Mestizo Spaces
Espaces Métissés

The Westernization
of the Political Order

ERTRAND BADIE

rranslated by Claudia Royal

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L LAW SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY

The Imported State

EDITORIAL BOARD
Jean-Marie Apostolideés
K. Anthony Appiah
Louis Brenner
Ngwarsungu Chiwengo
Jocelyne Dakhlia

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Sandra Harding
Francoise Lionnet
Hervé Moulin

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Mestizo Spaces

Espaces Métissés

V. Y. Mudimbe
EDITOR

Bogumil Jewsiewicki
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

The Imported State

The Westernization of the Political Order

Bertrand Badie

Translated by Claudia Royal

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

-_

a egg kA RPE

Stanford University Press
Stanford, California

© 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University

The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order
was originally published as

L’état importé: L’occidentalisation de l’ordre politique

© 1992, Libraire Arthéeme Fayard.

Assistance for the translation was provided by the
French Ministry of Culture.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Badie, Bertrand.

[Etat importé. English]

The imported state : the westernization of the political order / Bertrand Badie ;
translated by Claudia Royal.

p- cm. —(Mestizo spaces)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN O-8047-3387-2 (alk. paper)

1. Developing countries—Politics and government. 2. Dependency.
3. Politicaldevelopment. 4. Internationalrelations. I. Series.
JF60 .B24313 2000
320.9172'2—dc21 99-087857
Original printing 2000

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:
69 G8 OF G6 OF Of Of GH Gr oO

Typeset by James P. Brommer in 10/13 Bodoni Book

To the memory of my father, Monsour Badie

ol eT ee

a

_

ie ee

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: The Exportation of Political Models
1. The Logic of Dependence

2. The Universalist Claim of the State

PART TWO: The Importation of Political Models
3. Importers and Their Strategies

4. Imported Products

PART THREE: Failed Universalization and Creative Deviation
5. Internal Disorders
6. International Disorders
Conclusion
Notes

Bibliography
Index

131

165
169
201

233

239
249
261

Introduction

| has not come to an end. The twentieth century has seen the fall of
several totalitarian regimes and the end of colonialism, at least in the clas-
sical sense. The move toward independence produced a temporary prolif-
eration and uniformity of states pretty much everywhere on the planet. It
promoted the formation of a vast “third world,” to use a misleading term,
that was seen as a stage of apprenticeship leading to membership in the
mainstream world. The final stage was to lead to democracy, which, for lack
of any other model, seemed to be the ultimate goal of History.

However, these developmentalist visions are languishing in the last of
their illusions, while the dreams of convergence and the myth of a uniform,
continuous advance vanish into thin air. The social sciences are now solidly
postdevelopmentalist, which at least makes them more lucid. Time has
done its work: the paths taken by countries in Africa and Asia over the last
third of a century have not conformed to the expected models. No states
based on Enlightenment ideals have blossomed; political competition has
not led to progress; the visions of what the state should be have found no
common ground. However, the answer to the question of why this is the case
does not lie in this disillusioned assertion, which, by itself, is not enough to
reopen the matter for analysis. Such an analysis would lead only to other
questions; empirical investigations reveal the paradoxes of a planned glob-
alization and its unexpected effects on developmental processes.

“Globalization” is the establishment of an international system tending
toward unification of its rules, values, and objectives, while claiming to in-

2 INTRODUCTION

tegrate within its center the whole of humanity. Never before seen in his-
tory, this process seems naturally to support and even confirm the hypoth-
esis of convergence. In fact, it reveals the limits of such a hypothesis by ex-
posing several inconsistencies: by stimulating the importation of Western
models into societies in the South,” it reveals its inadequacy; by inciting
peripheral societies to adapt, it raises hopes of innovation that may very
well be false; by rushing the process of world unification, it encourages the
rebirth and affirmation of individual characteristics; by endowing the 1 in-
ternational order with a center of power more structured than ever, it tends
to intensify conflict} By seeking to bring historical development to an end,
it suddenly launches History in varied and contradictory directions.

The first of these inconsistencies is not the least. The years following de-
colonization clearly revealed the failure of all mimicry in the constitutional
area. Everything indicates, however, that mimicry has not ceased and that
it has even intensified. Even stranger, importation often prevails over ex-
portation, since the elite in Southern societies continue to borrow, even
while loudly condemning the practice. It is as if the logic of globalization
goes from error to error, depriving peripheral societies of the means to
correct themselves. This vicious circle is, of course, related to a network of
forces, but we can hypothetically say that it is further nourished by stra-
tegic considerations, and notably by the advantages from which certain
members of the elite profit. of

Thus the non-Western societies are perpetually torn between a logic of
adaptation and a logic of innovation. The first is considered “realistic”; it
is certainly rational in the short term. The second coincides intellectually
with thoughtful reflections on long-term effects. Practitioners and sociol-
ogists often try to reconcile them, in particular by assigning innovative
features to those practices stemming from a forced hybridization} Such a
synthesis is dangerous; it is especially fragile because the two systems of
thought derive, in fact, from contradictory strategies: in the context of
massive and relatively uncontrolled importation, innovation becomes the
natural emblem of protest and casts doubt on the authorities more than it
reinvents them, Thus revivalist calls also rouse to action, since they are
more accusatory and populist than programmatic and constructivist. As

*Translator’s note: The term “South” is used throughout this text to refer to the
generally poorer, “third world,” non-Western countries, found most often in the
southern hemisphere, in contrast to the richer, developed countries in the “North,”
that is, Western Europe and North America. In addition, the term “princes of the
South” refers to the more tribal, clannish, or familial, but more specifically, local
rulers in opposition to the “princes of the North,” those leaders who represent the
state as it has evolved in the Western world.

INTRODUCTION 3

producers of divergences, such calls exacerbate the gulf between the gov-
ernors and the governed. They reveal and dramatize the process of west-
ernization, preventing the banalization of everything that proclaims itself
universal,

Globalization, then, goes hand in hand with the glorification of singu-
_larity. This association is even more curious in that the first is demanding,
offering many promising resources: the unification of the international sys-
tem is based on solid technical means that promote mobility, communica-
tion, interpenetration; it aims at the effective reduction of particularities
as well as membership in a common juridical, political, economic, and
even ethical order. The individuality that confronts it lacks the advantage
of power: it can certainly mobilize resources unavailable to the center, but
it thrives in particular on blockages and oppositions stirred up by any kind
of cultural homogenization.

‘Henceforth, globalization reconstructs the very idea of dependence.
Even supposing a unified international order fortified by a complex process
of a diffusion of models, globalization implies the prior existence of a
power structure driving international relations. Complex in its unity, this
structure is not determined by any single factor, nor can it be considered
exclusively economic, [t cannot be reduced to a simple play of actors, and
particularly not to a “plot by the dominating forces.” Its principal property
is the creation of networks as well as utilities that unite the players of the
“North” and the “South,” who possess very diverse interests and objec-
tives. Provoking power, globalization also creates its own opposition, en-
genders its own conflicts, and sets up its own divergences. Finding visibil-
ity in its claim to unify models, it confers on the tensions it generates a
primarily cultural tone.

Contradictory in its realizations, utopian in its pretensions, naive in its
postulates, denounced, occasionally demonized, generator of often violent
conflicts, cultural dependence remains, even grows, and increasingly con-
trols the international scene. Behind all these ambiguities appears perhaps
the essential hypothesis: beyond these dysfunctions, sometimes because of
them, cultural dependence disposes of a not insignificant political capac-
ity, one that determines how the international system functions, and
specifically how peripheral societies evolve. As a result, it is effective and
functional, as much for those who export its cultural models as for those
who import them, as much for what it realizes as in how it manages its fail-
ures. From this universalization made up of successes and setbacks, of re-
sistances and tensions, new histories unfold, ones that perhaps bring inno-
vations into the center of non-Western societies, just as they do into the
center of the international system.

PART ONE

The Exportation of
Political Models

a
>

Prstice models are not necessarily exported consciously; nor is such an
exportation part of a plot or, even less, a “Western stratagem,” as a certain
facileness of language or an overzealous, often poorly conceived third-
worldist view would have us believe. Yet for two centuries at least, political
thought, institutions, and practices, as well as legal codes and economic
theories, have migrated from the shores of Europe or North America to-
ward the south and east. Colonization or conquest have often, but not al-
ways (far from it), served as vectors, as the examples of the Ottoman em-
pire, China, and Japan reveal. The most effective exportation has often
been the most diffuse, carried by the configuration of power that has struc-
tured a worldwide, international order since the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, activated and reactivated by the claim to universalism that character-
izes the Western political construct.

The dynamic of dependence and universal identity naturally reinforce
each other and help unify the West, at least in an analytical sense. As the
center of the international system they have globalized, the Western soci-
eties, from Western Europe to North America, occupy the same position of
power and are linked by the same political language. Though their concep-
tions of law differ, their judicial exports obscure those differences, as the
example of India suggests. Quite obviously in competition with each other,
and even stimulated by rivalry in influence and conquest, these states none-
theless provide the societies they approach, or who request help from them,
with formulas that partake of the same cultural universe, that help con-
solidate the same international order, and that give rise to the same disso-
nances within the receiving collectivities.

Similarly, exportation practices are not always identical, even if these
differences apply more to the methods of colonization than to the process
of diffusion as a whole. With its strong state control, France applied the
method of direct administration in its colonies, thus spreading a political
and administrative culture that nonetheless differed from what was prac-
ticed at home. Since Great Britain was less state controlled, it relied on the
practice of indirect rule, which allowed it to better handle precolonial rela-
tionships of authority. These differences, however, faded with decoloniza-
tion and the subsequent construction of new states. They fade even more
when one looks at westernization from a global perspective: then every-
thing happens as if the dynamic of importation, as well as the constraints
and tropisms that affect it, outweigh the conditions proper to each mecha-
nism of importation so as to standardize the results and to better legitimize
their genuinely universal claims.

1. The Logic of Dependence

On. can easily observe the principle of national sovereignty empirically.
It is not necessary that a society be colonized in order to demonstrate its de-
pendence on another; nor does a seat in the United Nations suffice for a
state to claim full sovereignty, its legal status notwithstanding. This funda-
mental flaw in our system of international law is more than just academic:
knowledge of the mechanisms that obliterate sovereignty allows us to re-
solve the enigma of power in international relations and to understand how
certain political models travel, spread, and take root in other countries—in
other words, how they can emigrate from the countries that dominate the
international order.

Latin American social scientists have significantly systematized their re-
flections on this process.' In the 1950s South America was considered an
anomaly: independent but under domination, the Latin American nations
represented the bad conscience of the postwar international order; as the
place where the international order seemed the most categorical, these na-
tions fell victim to sociological mechanisms that clearly violated most of
the articles in the United Nations charter. Underdevelopment no longer
provided an excuse, since the situation continued to deteriorate: a tempo-
rary situation was fast becoming chronic. The opposition between the for-
mal and the real-which no one could ignore-led to the hypothesis of dou-
bling: behind a formal :ntegration into the international political system,
the Latin American nations felt the effects of an incorporation into the cen-
ter of an international capitalist system. What the political order formal-
ized, the economic order dismantled.

Io THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

The Failure of an Economic Vision

The entry of the sociology of dependence into the domain of the social sci-
ences was all the more sensational because it brought with it several pos-
tulates. One was the unity of the sciences of society, because only the dis-
‘sociation of economic and political approaches could support the illusion
of national sovereignty. Another was the international dimension of devel-
opment, since a purely internal analysis could dangerously obscure the
real reasons for economic backwardness by attributing it to cultural fac-
tors. Finally, there was the determining nature of transnational relations
that disrupt borders and sovereignties, that place the study of power in
both national and international contexts, and that reveal the existence of a
worldwide unifying capitalist system endowed with a center and a periph-
ery. In this view, the periphery appears to be manipulated on at least three
fronts. Drained by the center, it feeds the economic development of the
hegemonic powers. Structurally backward, its worsening underdevelop-
ment serves the interests of the center and reinforces the conditions of its
domination. Held in check by the functions assigned to it by the interna-
tional division of labor, it supports a development from which it obtains no
benefit.,

In sum, this economic vision took hold because of its functionalism: the
order of dependence was forged and reproduced without any challenge to
its effectiveness or its ineluctable logic. The individual actor becomes use-
less and exploitable: he has no control over the mechanisms that suppress
the sovereignty of his native country; whether he chooses to collaborate or
protest, his choice will have no effect on the collective order. The prince of
the South becomes an irresponsible puppet. No act of will can either stop
or speed up the processes regulating the international economic order.

This thesis surprised no one. Several decades earlier, Marxist analysis
claimed to have detected the economic processes that began the dynamic
of dependence. Following the Ricardian tradition, Lenin had already de-
veloped an economic theory of imperialism by noting the functional ne-
cessity of an absorption of surplus.” According to this theory, since surplus
is linked to industrial development and the fusion of industrial and finan-
cial capitalism, it manifests itself as a profusion of excess capital that grav-
itates to less-developed countries, where profits would be at their highest.
This new financial dynamic thus marks the beginning of the world as di-
vided among the powers of the northern hemisphere, making imperialism
the “highest stage of capitalism.” Lenin’s explanation has been a disap-

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE Il

poimtment, however, because most of the flow of capital remained confined
within the developing world, even when imperial expansion reached its
apex. Moreover, of all the capitalist countries, Germany was the one that
best corresponded to Lenin’s understanding of imperialist tendencies; yet
Germany was the European country least involved in colonial conquest.

In the tradition of Adam Smith, Rosa Luxemburg proposed an alternate
interpretation that seems no more convincing.’ Increasingly focused on
the opposite contradiction of production and consumption, she saw capi-
talist economy as characterized by an urgent need to acquire new markets
that would absorb the production that a too-moderate increase in purchas-
ing power could not consume. Thus colonial conquest supported the ex-
portation of goods. Her analysis is disappointing because it underestimates
the role of the state, which beginning with Keynesianism, brought about a
different and more effective redistribution of the functions of production
and consumption. Imperialism could certainly have had the market effects
she assigns to it. But it would be incorrect to mistake this possibility for a
necessity and to see this hypothetical dependence [of capitalism on colo-
nial expansion] as a long-term, stable, a priori fact, not subject to other
uses or capable of either changing purpose or fulfilling several purposes.

It would, of course, be incorrect to dismiss the recent reworkings of the
economic paradigm. Notably, Cardoso has decisively shown how relations
of dependence can be modulated as a function of the strategies of those in
power at the center of an international system.* The construction of an
American hegemony thus broke with the nineteenth-century imperial
model and abandoned agricultural production to peripheral countries in
order to entrust industrial production to the center. This division of labor
was upset by the United States’ innovative formulas of dependence through
enclaves that directly organized and controlled investment and production
sites at negligible cost in the very center of the developing world. The po-
litical order was transformed: in the peripheral societies, power lost even
more of its deliberative function, the enclaves became even less subject to
the external forces of sovereignty, and the hypothesis of incorporation lost
even more ground.,

This perspective is provocative because it is a little more humane: there
are actors in it, and they have relevant strategies, and the processes of de-
pendence are presented as unstable. However, though the model becomes
viable, it remains marked by the same heaviness that encumbered eco-
nomic determinism, Incorporation into the international capitalist system
alone is supposed to control the entire mechanism of dependence. More-

I2 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

over, the peripheral political elite is unable to escape the logic of the sys-
tem. While the central actor takes part in decision making, the peripheral
one seems, on the contrary, completely passive, condemned to lose more
and more of his autonomy and forced to perform repressive functions that
bring him absolutely no benefit..

This economist logic, however, resembles a colossus with clay feet. Nu-
merous historical and sociological observations easily demonstrate the
fragility of a theory that prevails only by its scope and globalizing preten-
sions. Hans Morgenthau and, later, Raymond Aron drew up a long list of
contradictions and denials of all sorts that historians of the colonial period
kept artificially viable.’ The two most imperialist nations, France and
Great Britain, are also the ones that, from an economic point of view, were
the least in need: France, because of its low economic and demographic
increases, and Great Britain, because its age and its development shel-
tered it from tensions that it could, in any case, regulate with its domin-
ions more than with its colonies. In addition, the colonial enterprise only
” rarely received support from the economic elite, as the debates in Third
Republic France surrounding the conquests of Tonkin and the African
continent reveal.

But history confirms that political mechanisms have significantly af-
fected colonial development. Since politicians directed and organized im-
perial expansion, it developed synchronously with political and diplomatic
proposals and strategies at the national level. The Franco-Italian rivalry
sheds light on the circumstances surrounding the conquest of Tunisia, just
as the Franco-German rivalry reveals the modalities of conquest in Mo-
rocco. The Congress of Berlin carved up Africa according to the competi-
tions among the nations of Europe, which merely reproduced the age-old
imperialism inextricably linked to the concept of state-controlled govern-
ment. Since Tilly’s work, we know that the postfeudal international order
led each state to seek simultaneously the maximum territorial resources to
protect itself and, by competitive confrontation, to find the means to
strengthen its own institutionalization.® The Peace of Westphalia in 1648
created a Europe frozen in borders so intangibly fixed that this very intan-
_gibility became an established principle in which competition could occur
only externally. As Schumpeter affirms, expansion thus became an end in
itself, the simple geographical displacement of the will to dominate for the
sake of dominating.’ The parallel with the modern logic of dependence
seems striking.| The economic advantages of this logic notwithstanding,
the political foundations of dependence may be seen from two perspec-

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 13

tives: the central role played by the political actors in the construction of
this relation, and the effective and deterministic mediation by the state in
establishing its logic.

Observing the actor’s role helps somewhat to demythologize the matter:
obviously, it leads one to limit determinism, to question the relevance of
deterministic perspectives; it also introduces an element of liberty that was
obscured by the postulate of forced incorporation into the international
economic system. More palpably, it disproves the hypothesis, obviously too
simple, of unequivocal relations between dominant and dominated, since
it suggests that dependence evolves at least partially from a convergence of
strategies that bring together, in a functional exchange, the elites of the

~ North and the elites of the South. Galtung’s works have opportunely drawn
our attention to this fact. He hypothesizes that imperialism could develop
to its full capacity only if the individuals and collective actors on both sides
of the borders that, within the very heart of the international system, sepa-
rate the center and the periphery maintain a certain harmony.’® Such a har-
“mony presupposes an active convergence of the interests of the elites in the
center with those of the elites in the periphery. It further implies that the
° conflicts between elites and masses are more acute at the periphery than in
_ the center. Finally, it requires that the interests of the masses in the center
’ conflict with those of the periphery. One can see clearly what takes shape
beneath these apparently simple characteristics: on one hand, a strategy of
at least partial collaboration between the princes of the South and the
~ princes of the North that requires, among other things, that dependence
be equally remunerative for the former; on the other, the reproduction, in-
deed the increase, of the gap between elites and masses of the South, thus
separating the social spheres and the official political scene in such a way
as to perpetuate the condition of dependence. Similarly, this model was fol-
lowed in the elements deployed since the Congress of Baku, when the
Third International sought to combat imperialism specifically by trying to
reconcile the proletariat of the North with the popular masses in the
South. From all these points of view, the processes of dependence remain
fundamentally a composite of the strategies of power and the strategies of
mobilization, and thus a veritably political objective.

Dependence by the State

The same logic governs the preeminent role of the state. The Northern
states produce dependence, of course, by the very fact of their competition,

14 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

but also by the effect of the political and diplomatic strategies they use to
accumulate power} Moreover, dependence arises from the very confronta-
tion of their capacities with those of the developing “states.” |Callaghy’s
formula, applied to these “states,” is significant, since it depicts them as
“lame Leviathans,”? thus underscoring the powerful imbalance existing
between the state’s claims to govern the entire social order and the actual
weakness of its performance\ This imbalance relates to several elements,
each of which individually sustains the effects of dependence and whose
makeup noticeably worsens those effects.

The neopatrimonial construction of power is both a major trait of devel-
oping societies and a decisive element in the connection between princes
of the South and those of the North.” It describes a weakly observable phe-
nomenon, found as much in Africa as in Southeast Asia or the Middle East:

‘the prince’s strategy consists in appropriating for himself the political
space and, based on that, the principal resources belonging to private so-
cial spaces. Though initially personal, this practice quickly becomes col-
lective, in order to benefit equally both close associates and the whole of
the state bourgeoisie, whose survival depends primarily on its capacity to
find a place in the patrimonial logic. When this phenomenon is viewed
from a moral perspective, as it often is, it is viewed pejoratively. However,
it derives essentially from social mechanisms that cannot be dissociated
from the conditions of dependence.

|Neopatrimonialism stems, in effect, from the paucity of internal re-
sources available to the political system, relative to the abundance of ex-
ternal resources, The Western state has come about in part by performing
the function of fiscal extraction, while civil society possessed, in turn, an
effective counterpower thanks to a system of representation that enabled
the populace to vote on the issue of taxes. The modest, often insignificant
role played by taxation in financing the expenses of the Southern nations
tends to deprive the populace of a means to exert pressure on and exercise
control over the government. As the entity administering relations with the

_ exterior, then, the state becomes the principal provider of resources. Ac-
quired in the processes of international negotiations, these resources rein-
force the dependence of the elite in the peripheral nations relative to the
elite in the Northern nations, while simultaneously endowing the latter
with a super-strength relative to the social spaces they supposedly govern.

At the same time, neopatrimonial logic derives strength from the seg-
mentation characterizing the society it must contend with." The history of
the individualization of social relations is largely tied to the course of de-

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 15

velopment in the West, where the state, civil society, and the bond between
citizens find their fullest significance. In this history, the hinge between
state and society is not neutral; the multiplicity of horizontal alliances and
divisions that structure state and society constrain political interactions
and define the conditions under which such interactions will take place,
power will change hands, and debates will be organized. From this point on,
in the West the political actor is no longer the master of his environment. In
the peripheral societies, however, the persistence of community alliances
and the precedence given to traditional identifications over civil ones cre-
ate, in those societies, a layering effect in both the extra-political spaces
and the microcommunity spaces, as the progress of tribalism and the pro-
liferation of particularisms reveal. Thus insulated from those individuals
without political status, the professional man of power in a peripheral soci-
ety is far more capable than his Western counterpart of appropriating so-
cial goods and rearranging the border separating the public and the private
to his own advantage.”

Management of this border is facilitated by the convergence of several
factors. First, power is itself constructed on a communal mode: either
the tribe attains the ranks of a political class or the presence of a mono-
cratic system stimulates the formation of clans. Through, for example, the
dowreh in Iran or the shillal in Egypt, the holders of power control all the
channels, permitting them to cross freely from private to public space.
The absence or the meagerness of horizontal alliances, particularly of
interest-based organizations, promotes the proliferation of vertical chan-
nels: a party of the Arab nation, the Ba’ath Party, thus became in Syria the
party of the Alaouite minority and in Iraq the party of the Takriti clan; a
party formed to promote a new progressive political class based on social-
ist and nationalist ideals, the Tunisian Neo-Destour was transformed little
by little into the party controlled by the Sahelians. Similarly, family al-
liances between political and economic elites in Lebanon were structured
like clans, while the traditional legitimists allied with the royal families in
the conservative monarchies in Morocco or, formerly, in Iran participate
actively in governmental and business affairs. In Saudi Arabia, the mer-
chant class takes part in the areas controlled by the royal family all the more
willingly because the royal family guarantees it a monopoly in financial and
economic activities, and this in a country where foreign companies have no
legal access to the local market."

From this point of view, opulence has the same effect as precariousness
or even poverty. If the former activates patrimonialism by the abundance of

16 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

contracts it dispenses and goods it controls, the latter profits from a differ-
ent but equally effective means. In the center, the limited resources be-
longing to the state incite the political actors to diversify their assets: state
control in Ivory Coast of the office regulating coffee prices is not only an in-
strument of control for the political center but also an extremely effective
way to finance state expenses and, consequently, to provide for the needs
inherent to bureaucratic excess. More generally, corruption has increased

_Asecause there are far too many civil servants and they are all paid far too Lit-
tle; at the same time, the prince attempts to involve the largest number of
educated young men in government institutions in order to make them
loyal to himself. This strategy follows the example of Gamal Abdel Nasser,
who decided that all university graduates could apply for employment in
the public sector. In this vicious circle, the more civil servants there are,
the less they are paid and the more they are drawn to seek compensation,
through social connections, in the appropriation, however modest, of so-
cial benefits. At the other end of the spectrum the expectations are identi-
cal. The sociologist Banfield had earlier shown convincingly that precari-
ousness was a rational source of clientelism. In other words, the more
limited the resources, the more an individual seeks to build direct relations
with a superior belonging to the central political elite. This logic allows the
individual to hope for some gain that he will not have to share as he would
have had to in a horizontal structure based on a coalition of interests. Valu-
able as well as functional on both sides, the clientelist approach keeps the
borders fluid, even to the point of effectively blurring the lines between
public and private. ‘

Here too, dependence is both cause and effect. The precariousness of re-
sources relates largely to the effects of economic dependence; a more or
less strong segmentation of society is itself partially linked to the circum-
stances of colonial conquest, whereas the resulting colonial administration
tended to perpetuate, even at times to protect, the communal tribal order.
In short, neopatrimonialism most certainly results from a combination of
economic factors and political strategies. In return, these characteristics
reinforce the bonds of dependence: the segmentary nature of the social or-
der favors the dynamics of incorporation into the international economic
system. The construction of microcommunal economies, whether infor-
mally or through their direct management by family communities, paves
the way for the establishment of the enclaves Cardoso analyzes. It encour-

- ages the reproduction of a dual economy, half of which is largely immune to
the logic of the marketplace, and half of which is part of the global econ-

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE I7

omy." As a result, in Zimbabwe, for example, the opposition is divided be-
tween large-scale commercial agriculture, controlled by a small minority of
whites holding 39 percent of the land, and a communal agriculture cover-
ing 42 percent of the land and providing livelihood for 53 percent of Zim-
babwe’s population. Not only does this distribution directly support Zim-
babwe’s efforts to participate economically at the international level, it also
promotes a neopatrimonial strategy fulfilling several functions necessary to
the maintenance of Zimbabwe’s economy. It establishes a formula of com-
promise and coexistence between the white minority and the state, wherein
the latter continues to allot essential subsidies to the former in exchange for
the financing of its bureaucratic machinery. Similarly, in terms of the black
peasant class, this neopatrimonial strategy allows the state to maintain a
minimal relationship with the local economies that escape every attempt at
central regulation. Because it has no recourse to the various types of stimu-
lation at the disposal of economic political forces, the political elite must
resign itself to affecting these local economies through clientelist relations

and interpersonal networks. The Land Acquisition Bill, not passed until

March 1992 by the Harare parliament, anticipates, of course, an expropria-

tion of large landholdings and a redistribution of land. It is significant,

however, that its passage was so late that its application remains uncertain

and that it is perceived as a threat to Zimbabwe’s economy.”

It would certainly be risky and reductionist to cling to the binary vision
of one sector aligned with a dominating and expansionist exterior opposed
to another sector of dominated and regressive self-consumption. For one
thing, the latter benefits from infrastructural funds produced by the for-
mer. Through their own development, white agriculture and industry have
constructed within Zimbabwe a communications network from which the
black economy continues to benefit. Moreover, by imitation and emulation,
the power of the exporting economic sector has undeniably rebounded on
the traditional sector, which has provoked the black peasantry to coalesce,
_ to organize itself into cooperatives, and to benefit from a more performa-
tive technical knowledge. Like Nigeria, a country equally exposed to the
stimulation of a modern economic enclave, Zimbabwe is well connected in
a network that limits the segmentizing tendency of social spaces. However,
this network is of minimal significance because the power of the white sec-
tor in Zimbabwe short-circuits any initiatives by the black agricultural com-
munity that might endanger its influence. Both white and black partners
cooperate directly under conditions that are individually very advanta-
geous, but which contradict the collective interests of the black peasantry.

18 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

The whites propose to buy from the blacks part or all of their produce at
prices lower than those asked by the commercial cooperatives, but which
still remain advantageous to the large-scale white farmer who can find his
supplies close at hand at a lesser price. The division of labor between com-
mercial agriculture and supplementary agriculture thus continues with the
active support of a state that benefits from it, since it optimizes its re-
sources in the short term and protects its own network of clients.

The neopatrimonial focus of political systems is also guaranteed by the
essentially political identity of those who govern. Whether they come from
the entourage of princes in traditional monarchies or from the ranks of the
liberation movements in formerly colonized societies, these people exer-
cise their power by means of skills and resources that only increase their
isolation from the social spaces. Founding fathers of states have thus often
fallen victim to their own creation, which, whether acquired through a war
of liberation or a smooth, gradual gaining of independence, loses its own
substance as the princes confront the daily life of managing states that
more often than not lack resources. ‘When they have benefited from a tra-
ditional devolution of power, the monarchies can reproduce their legiti-
macy only by relying on a history less and less compatible with the require-
ments of socioeconomic modernization. In the first case, the prince tries to
compensate for the erosion of his authority by a heavy symbolic invest-
ment, which leads him to present himself, as did Habib Bourguiba, Félix
Houphouét-Boigny, or Ahmed Sukarno, as the “father of the nation,” and
thus found his patrimonial domination both personally and affectively. |
Alternatively, this focus is combined with a proliferation of ideological
symbols that confer a political identity on this domination: Marxism in
‘Zimbabwe, socialism in Nasser’s Egypt or Nehru’s India. The ideological
compensation picks up where the mobilizing effects of the national libera-
tion struggle leave off, but it takes on an aspect all the more formal in that
this anticapitalist focus allows the existence of a powerful international
‘economic sector that escapes state control. Its only relevance is therefore
political and internal, thus promoting the reproduction of the neopatri-
monial order. In the case of monarchies, the prince is led to diversify his
strategy, reserving his traditional discourse for the rural areas and com-
pensating for his deficit of legitimacy within urban society by a recourse to
clientelist techniques, as can be seen in the example of Morocco, In both
these cases, the inability of the governing elite to acquire a representative
capacity, that is, to define itself either as the expression of certain cate-
gories of social interests or as the bearer of a socioeconomic modernizing

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 19

process, leads to the confirmation of neopatrimonial formulas as well as to
their growing delegitimation within the social spaces."

This delegitimation is all the more evident in the increasingly ambigu-
ous attitude that the political elites seem condemned to take toward eco-
nomic development. On one hand, economic development is a goal that
every head of state must pursue, yet each such head of state must also im-
pose his hierarchical authority on the peripheral leaders who uphold tradi-
tional values. On the other hand, an overly active policy of development
risks producing several negative results: it would valorize the competence
of the technocratic elite relative to that of the fragile political elite, break
up social spaces and favor the constitution of a civil society capable of coun-
terbalancing the political system, and indeed, neutralize neopatrimonial
strategies, which would in effect lose their essential effectiveness in the
context of an active modernization, where the resources of power would be
otherwise divided and where the nompatneal elites mend have direct ace
cess to the center. “~~” de I a

Fearing the formation of a rival elite causes the princes to pursue vari-
ous strategies: the active control of the education of young diplomats,
whom they absorb directly into the various administrative agencies of their
regimes; the limitation of direct access by nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) to the social spaces in which they hope to promote development;
the establishment of themselves as a necessary intermediary in the negoti-
ation and channeling of foreign aid for development; and the prioritization
of this aid toward financing government expenses, in order to thus cover
costs incurred by the neopatrimonial managing of power. It is probably at
this level that the contradiction between neopatrimonialism and develop-
ment is most evident, But what is also especially clear, and most patently
so, is the link between this type of political order and dependence. It is not
simply the case that this dependence relation is made stronger when the
process of economic emancipation in the peripheral areas is moderated,
indeed retarded, by neopatrimonialism; this dependence relation is built
upon an active solidarity and a convergence of interests between the elites
of the North and those of the South. This relation has nothing mechanical
about it: on the contrary, the political elites of the South relegitimize their
regimes and mobilize their people politically by denouncing imperialism.
Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez canal or Mossadegh’s of the Anglo-
Iranian Company, or even Bourguiba’s reconquest of Bizerte or Nehru’s of
Goa are cases in point. In the early 1960s, Sukarno, Kwame Nkrumah,
and Ahmed Sékou Touré all made great use of the symbols of the struggle

20 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

against imperialism. However, economic initiatives and symbolic actions
cannot overturn a cluster of factors long in place and constituted by a solid
material reality: the political weaknesses of a developing state, the scarcity
of resources available to the elites by virtue of their strictly political iden-
tity, and the narrowness of means available to them to remain in power and
contain social pressure.
Politics thus becomes a decisive element in constructing dependence re-
Aations. The “dependentist” school incorrectly rejects politics as accessory
or derivative, in favor of an economic thesis that leads to deformed, even
caricatural, analyses of the state’s role, which are very broad and often con-
tradictory. In a systematic-functionalist perspective, Immanuel Waller-
stein notices that the logic of international domination renders powerless
any state emerging at the periphery whose dynamic could, by its indepen-
dence and sovereignty, thwart the interests of world capitalism. In a simi-
lar reasoning process, André Gunder-Frank considers the peripheral state
a puppet that merely maintains the juridical and political illusion of an in-
dependence that the economic context renders in all respects impossible.”
Inversely, Cardoso does not challenge the hypothesis of a peripheral state
that, conversely, would be, according to him, called upon to assume the re-
pressive functions destined either to cause those it administers to accept
the logic of the international division of labor, or, in new modes of depen-
dence, to make them respect the direct submission of certain economic
sectors to the interests of international capitalism.”° The extreme form of
the school of dependence, the neomercantilist school, goes so far as to re-
habilitate the peripheral state by presenting it as the sole possible rampart
against the inflow of power coming from the international environment.”!
The debate seems futile and distorted. It struggles to reproduce a sociol-
ogy that relegates the state to a simple superstructure equipped with an
“autonomy” more or less “relative.” More profoundly, it rests upon an in-
strumental and functional conception of a politics that has no reason for be-
ing: in developing countries, in this view, the political order is not consti-
tuted to engage in repression in the name of those in power or even to keep
up illusions or appearances that can serve their interests. Such a hypothe-
sis leads immediately to extreme conclusions; those who hold it posit either
the existence of an invisible hand devoted to imperialist interests and regu-
lating the international order to its benefit, or assert that cynically and with
absolute complicity the princes of the South, have placed themselves, with-
out a second thought, at the service of the Northern princes the moment
independence has been achieved. Taken to its logical conclusion, this con-

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 21

ception leads to the absurd: an anti-imperialist symbolism that inspires de-
ceptive practices meant to better hide the effects of dependence and thus
make them more effective. As for political structures, they would be, de-
pending on which analysis one consults, either simple facades or clumsy in-
struments of coercion.

This vision has produced several dead ends. Initially, it supported the er-
roneous hypothesis of a correlation between dependence and authoritari-
anism. Clearly, the ink between development and authoritarianism is con-
testable; the oil boom that so greatly benefited the countries of the Arabian
peninsula, Iran, and Libya, only confirmed their growing authoritarianism.
Moreover, the efforts of Guillermo O’ Donnell to associate authoritarian-
ism with the reinforcement of links with foreign capitalism and the rise of
populism with the promotion of economic nationalism proved doubly dan-
gerous.” First, because it would be presumptuous to see the appearance of
the dictatorships that have marked Latin America at the end of the second
millennium as indicating a regression of the mechanisms of dependence.
Second, because it would be excessive to systematically associate the pop-
ulist vogue with a simple manifestation of economic nationalism. Since the
beginning of the 1980s, Latin American populism has become increasingly
successful, as the elections of Alberto Fujimori as president in Peru and
Carlos Menem in Argentina have shown. In both cases, populism has set in
motion an economic policy that exacerbated the conditions of economic
dependence in the countries concerned. Besides, in all these cases, nation-
alism holds a secondary place, far behind a more profound reaction of cen-
sorship within official policy, of government officials, and in the state itself,
which reveals a profound tension between society and neopatrimonial po-
litical structures. As such, this phenomenon occurs in Africa through the
combined resurgence of tribalism and sects; in the Moslem world and the
Indian subcontinent it occurs through the diverse revivalist expressions or
through particularist resurgences with intentionally vague outlines. To ig-
nore the antipatrimonial orientation, centered initially on government
leaders, which characterizes these populist movements amounts to a denial
of the dense international political relations among the developing soci-
eties. To single out their xenophobic orientation and make it the mark of a
popular challenge against dependence leads one to forget that the denunci-
ation of the foreign is a current dimension of populist-type social move-
ments, mentioned above, notably by Eric Hobsbawm.”*

Similarly, underestimating the political mediation of dependence phe-
nomena makes it difficult, even impossible, to analyze the “newly indus-

22 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

trializing nations” (NIN).*4 The rise in these countries of an economy of
exportation does not correspond with the thesis of “development from un-
derdevelopment” advanced by the “dependentists”; moreover, this rise ob-
_scures the demarcation between the world of the dominators and that of
_ the dominated, only adding to the confusion created by the existence of a
communist world and that of the Southern countries rich in natural re-
sources. Economic heterogeneity is such that, in the North as in the South,
any binary distinction becomes effectively schematic, rendering economic
variables apparently insignificant. Further, amendments proposed by the
sociology of dependence are unconvincing. Regarding the economic suc-
cess of certain southern societies, Cardoso refers to a “dependent-associ-
ate development”; here he diverges from the untenable thesis of an irre-
versible deterioration of economic conditions within the periphery of the
international system. However, this hypothesis is largely fictional: contrary
to what had been generally thought, notably in a “neoclassical” perspec-
tive, the success of the NINs owes little to the pressure of an international
economic system, to the regulating and incorporating effects of the world
market, and even less to the establishment of any kind of international di-
vision of labor/ The performance of the new industrial powers is a function
of political factors, state financial support, tax breaks, their own political
protectionism, and especially their very repressive social policies.*° States
and the political elite have contributed substantial funds, which modify the
economic situation noticeably and even the effectiveness of an economic
dependence that, without having disappeared, is substantially weakened
and altered because the rise of the NINs has even begun to limit technolog-
ical dependence, as in India or South Korea, and financial dependence, as
in the latter. |

However, equally revealing, these states have not departed from a single
one of the political attributes that we have emphasized. By choosing a polit-
ical strategy of development, they maintain basic control of it and decrease
only in the most illusory sense the overvaluing of politics relative to social
space. Because of the very characteristics of this strategy of development,
they also maintain the principal characteristics of their neopatrimonial ori-
entation, even strengthening some of them. Attempts to industrialize based
fundamentally on very active but very selective policies of exemptions, cred-
its, preferential tariffs in the public sector, and budgetary subsidies give the
state the means to accomplish its patrimonial tutelage even more vigor-
ously. State control of the banking sector and credit establishments—or, at
least, their direct and indirect control—derives from the axis of the rein-

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 23

forcement of the power elite’s patrimonial potential. Similarly, new data
coming from the economic transformations of the NINs do not noticeably
change the political dependence of their states. This is true, as the examples
of Korea and Singapore have shown, but also as can be seen in the “little
dragons” like Thailand, the most industrialized countries of South Amer-
ica, and especially Brazil.

A political rereading of dependence relations thus solves the problem of
certain incoherences that the diversification of the peripheral economies
introduced into classical theories of dependence. Similarly, it eliminates
the clumsy category of the “semiperiphery” used by such authors as Wal-
lerstein, who must take account of the impossibility of dividing the “inter-
national economic system” into a center and a periphery. Where should
the Mediterranean economies, or those of Central Europe or Scandinavian
Europe be placed? Dependence analyzed in terms of location in the inte-
rior of a presumably unified system suggests the existence of intermediary
positions that only add confusion and incoherence to the explanation. On
the other hand, interpreting dependence in terms of actors and political
strategies frees one from systemic determinisms and from needing to re-
sort to largely incomprehensible subcategories.

Abandoning systemic constraints is probably the most serious achieve-
ment. Neither impotent puppets nor cynical accomplices, the political
elites can appear henceforth in the plenitude of their strategic accomplish-
ments. These cannot be appreciated in economic terms, but rather as a

Appi OCUd
< 7 :

function of a history and sociology that separate them from the domain of ‘ f,

economics. Their initiatives must, then, be understood in a double so-
ciopolitical context. On one hand, these initiatives have their own national
context, composed of a segmented social order, vertical social relations,
and a political scene the elites claim to monopolize and control without
competition but which is, in fact, structured according to cultural and in-
stitutional models that isolate them from society. On the other hand, there
is the international environment, which controls the sources of internal fi-
nances in these societies, but which also determines the rules of interstate
interaction, international norms, international influences, diplomatic ori-
entations, and, therefore, the conditions of access to the international
scene. Faced with this double constraint, strategic convergences occur:
separated from internal social spaces and challenged in their legitimacy,
these elites are well advised to invest in the international scene and to seek
patronage from the Northern princes, from whom they can thus obtain
protection and resources that will permit them subsequently to reinforce

24 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

their positions in the center of their own society. But, reciprocally, this
clientelist strategy encourages them to systematize their patrimonial prac-
tices. This occurs for two reasons: on one hand, because it provides them
with resources capable of making these practices effective; and on the
other, because their increasing focus on the exterior and their reinforced
clientelism widen the gap separating them from their internal social
spaces, thus reducing the institutional capacities of communication be-
tween governed and governing, and making recourse to neopatrimonial
tinkering inevitable. Thus the solidarity between internal and external pol-
itics appears profound, verifying the hypothesis of the political foundation
of dependence.

Patron States and Client States

Dependence functions more as an interaction than as a system. Rather
than determined intangibly by factors beyond human will, it is perpetually
created and recreated according to procedures that are in the final analysis
very like the clientelist model. This model has been developed to account
for internal conditions and to characterize a type of possible relation unify-
ing the governing and the governed within a single society. The links are
then defined as personal, dependence-creating, and based “on a reciprocal
exchange of favors between two people, the patron and the client, who con-
trol unequal resources.””° The logic of exchange, this inequality, just like
the verticality of the relation, applies perfectly to interstate relations. At
the same time, its individual construction poses certain problems that
could make this conceptualization metaphoric.

Quite evidently, dependence presupposes an exchange of favors: the
“patron state” allots to the “client state” goods necessary to its survival ac-
cording to a procedure identical with what occurs at the level of internal so-
cietal functions. In turn, the client state brings favors all the more diverse,
whether they concern the use of its territory or the symbolic power it holds
as a state on the international scene. The transfer of territorial rights from
the patron state corresponds, first of all, to what an abundant literature for-
merly called the “looting of the third world,” referring principally to its di-
verse and abundant natural resources. It is also known that this transfer fits
into the geopolitical aims of the patron state and concerns the granting of
military bases or simply of “facilities” for crossing the client state’s terri-
tory. These two are often demanded as exclusive rights, as Great Britain did
with Persia following the Afghan wars in the nineteenth century.

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 25

But it is remarkable that in modern times this transfer logic tends to be-
come outrageously diversified, as is revealed by the extension of the prac-
tice of the “trash state,” in which the client allows the patron to dump in-
dustrial waste on its land and in its waters. This kind of agreement concerns
in particular the Gulf of Guinea and the Horn of Africa.”’ The client state
can just as well withhold the rights available to it as an actor in the interna-
tional community. The right to vote granted to the francophone countries
of Africa is a current practice within international institutions, as revealed,
for example, by their refusal to approve the resolutions condemning French
policies in New Caledonia presented before the United Nations General As-
sembly in 1986 and 1987.

The inequality of relations is just as evident. It is founded, of course, on a
disparity of resources, but also on a difference of location within the inter-
national scene: in the internal order, the patron’s role comes from his pres-
ence at the center of the system, or at least from his proximity and easy ac-
cess to the center. The relation is henceforth unequal in that abandonment
by one’s partner has more serious consequences for the client state than for
the patron state. For the latter, these risks are minimal, since the loss of a
client results simply in a diminution of international influence; for the for-
mer, however, they are dramatic, since the loss of a patron means internal
asphyxia and ostracism from the international community. In addition, the
change of patron is more costly for the dominated state than a change of
client is for the dominating state. For example, Ethiopia’s change from
American patronage to Soviet patronage intensified the dependence of the
former empire of the Negus; and the release of Iran from clientelism after
the Islamic revolution was such a profound setback for the former empire
of the shah that Khomeini had to die before Iran’s more “realistic” inser-
tion into the international system, which favored the return to power of
young westernized technocrats who agreed to make certain concessions to
the powers that had educated them. Also, conforming to the traditional
logic of clientelism, movement remains fundamentally asymmetrical, hav-
ing a different meaning depending on whether it is initiated by the patron
or the client. Entrenched in the center, the patrons not only master the lan-
guage and rules of the international arena but also produce the norms that
regulate all the actors.

This asymmetry works at the financial, economic, military, and techno-
logical levels, but it also functions symbolically. The patron state defines
the symbols that the client state must adopt if it wishes to maintain the re-

26 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

lationship. All verbal, musical, and sartorial expression, and all that con-
tributes to the scene of power, develop in the center in order to organize
the sociopolitical life of client states. Clientelist relations thus create their
own inequality by the practice of forced resemblance: the portraits of Marx,
Engels, and Lenin will “emigrate” from Mogadishu to Addis-Ababa with
the inversion of clientelist relations from Somalia to Ethiopia;”* the ham-
mer and sickle of the Soviet flag will decorate the flags of states exchanging
Western patronage for Soviet.

What is more, the asymmetry of these relations produces the phenom-
ena of forced constitutional imitation. The client state must bring its own
political structures into alignment with those of the patron state. This can
be seen in the first wave of political parties devoted solely to mobilization
set up by the “progressive” states of Africa, which were modeled on those
found in the East; it can also be seen in the call by the Western patrons to
their clients to conform to Western, democratic history. The influence of
the patron state affects the client state’s very identity, whereas the reverse
influence is minor, bringing only marginal modifications to the sociopolit-
ical balance in the dominating states. The decisive elements that turn
clientelist relations into dependence relations can be found precisely in
this asymmetry.

The verticality of relations clearly goes in the same direction. This verti-
cality constitutes the logic of clientelism, since the client’s behavior privi-
leges relations linking it vertically to the patron over relations linking it to
other clients. This process is reinforced during precarious times: when re-
sources are limited, it is both more rational and more cynical to channel
them toward the patron, without becoming allied to others who are also in
need, in order not to have to share and in order to receive for oneself what-
ever allocations may exist. Clearly, on the international scale, dependence
is largely fed by such calculations, which provide concrete obstacles to the
construction of regional subgroups. Pan-Africanism, like Pan-American-
ism, suffers directly from this logic; every regional ensemble, moreover,
feels the repercussions of the individualism of its member states that aspire
to privileged relations with a more powerful exterior state. This is the case,
for example, with the Union of Arabic Maghreb, contained by Morocco’s
foreign policy of privileged partnership with West Europe. It is also the
case with the European Community itself, whose integration is held in
check by the hesitation of the United Kingdom, which seeks to optimize
the benefits of its privileged relations with the United States. Thus, the

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 27

force of clientelism for the world’s states depends on the ability of their bi-
lateral relations to supplant any effectiveness that associative logic might
have or, at least, to justify their own durability in a policy of integration that
they can only keep in check. From then on, the recomposition at all levels,
from the richest to the poorest, of a pyramid of vertical relations helps not
only to prevent horizontal alliances from thriving but also to make the re-
lation of dependence functionally attractive, which appears clearly in the
competition between the less endowed states.

The individual nature of the clientelist relation, on the other hand,
makes it difficult to apply this model internationally. Clientelism high-
lights individuals only, not collective beings: patron and client are called
upon to know each other, to establish personal, nonmediated relations
that may even be characterized as emotional and affectionate. In light of
the bilateral nature of such exchanges, the idea of this type of relation ex-
isting between states is untenable; such an analysis leads the internation-
alist to a metaphorical concept of clientelism, which implies, in effect, a
minimum of conscious, individualized choice and clear-minded accept-
ance. Thus clientelist relations are totally comprehensible only when they
specifically include individuals whose own interests depend on the contin-
uation of clientelism. However, it cannot be denied that state clientelism
tends to value personal mediation more than institutional mediation and
to involve the leaders of the client states directly as individuals, all the
more effectively in that the neopatrimonial nature of clientelized political
systems willingly supports such involvement. This process supposes in
particular that the favors furnished by the patron are separable and that
the prince of the client state draws some material and symbolic advantage
superior to what he could receive from either political independence or as-
sociation. The argument is, certainly, a useful and, all things considered,
rather popular way to explain the corruption of certain leaders in the
Southern countries. As such, however, this argument is insufficient. Of
course, it does have the advantage of closing an essential link in the chain
of dependence that Galtung had already foreseen. The at least partial per-
sonalization of the allocation furnished by the patron state consolidates
the loyalty of the dominated prince to the dominating prince; it also allows
for the reproduction of a neopatrimonial order at the periphery of the in-
ternational system that, as we have seen, fits right into a logic of depen-
dence: the prince of the South becomes, in turn, the patron of his people,
the principal dispenser of foreign goods. Consequently, he personally de-
cides how changing international inflows of goods will affect his country,

28 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

and thus becomes the attentive regulator for his nation of the relations of
domination.

Such an analysis, however, is not very fruitful. Aside from being essen-
tially cynical, too easily verifiable to be truly convincing, and totally con-
trolled by the postulates of methodological individualism, it forgets that
pure politics contains contradictory forces. The prince can play the card of
a populist type of mobilization by relying on the contrary nationalist argu-
ment; he can go beyond that and establish his legitimacy as one who con-
tests the international order, and thereby seek support beyond the borders
of his own country, as has been done from Nasser to Saddam Hussein, from
Sukarno to Nkrumah. Thus the clientelist relation is personalized in a
more complex way than what seems to be the case with a strictly utilitarian
approach. This relation must be seen in light of the changing strategies of
leaders in the peripheral states; it must also include their condition of po-
litical socialization and cultural dependence, account for their perception
of the international scene and their possibility of taking a part in it, and fi-
nally, consider their vision of the Western model of government and of the
necessity to import i it. As aresult, the clientelist relation is built principally
by client initiative and understood as the most favorable compromise
against a series of contradictory requirements: to administer a Western-
style state within the sociopolitical context of another culture; to safeguard
skills linked essentially to the administration of the state and which are fi-
nancially more successful internationally than within each of the depen-
dent societies; and to derive from their role as importer of the model state
the maximum protection and promotion of their own political careers.
Thus clientelist logic is driven by individuals and simultaneously promoted
as the constitutive principle of dependence relations among states.

This logic entails a series of consequences. First, it includes an effect of
duration: as in any clientelist relation, the longer dependence lasts, the
more effective it is. Loyalty thus becomes the first requirement from both
patron and client and becomes a legitimate expectation around which the
client organizes both its external and internal policies. Thus when the shah
reviled the treachery of his American protector, he revealed that for de-
cades his entire strategy had been developed in order to capitalize on the in-
ternal and external benefits of the absolute loyalty that linked him to the
United States.*’ In this relation, the patron feels similar constraints. The
privilege accorded to Morocco in France’s Maghrebian policy transcended
manifestly the orientation of parliamentary majorities just as much as it did
the political options of the Elysée Palace. Relying on the principle that the

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 29

sharifian kingdom is a pole of stability in a region subject to numerous up-
heavals, French policy had to sacrifice many advantages from other quar-
ters because they might offend the sharif. Whether it concerns disputes be-
tween Algeria and Morocco, Western Sahara, or the preference given to
Morocco in its conflict with Mauritania, or whether it concerns France’s ac-
tions regarding opposition within Morocco, the idea has always been to an-
ticipate the special favors that the patron can hope to gain from long-term
loyalty. The American attitude during the Gulf crisis was the same. The in-
vestment represented by several decades of American protection of Kuwait
limited drastically any maneuverability the White House could have, as
much because a noninterventionist position risked annulling a posteriori
the effects of favors already dispensed to the As-Sabah family as because it
would ruin the credibility of its protection, also offered to Saudi Arabia and
other clients in the region.

In this way, the clientelist relation leads logically to an accumulation of
pledges, on both sides, according to the modalities and rhythm that, little by
little, give it a real autonomy as far as the very will of the actors is concerned.
With a diminution of choice, international relations grow somewhat rigid,
to a much greater extent than the constrictive effects produced by the mili-
tary alliances of the past. The logic of accumulation is, in effect, quite dif-
ferent: the characteristic of clientelism is to engage in continual and daily
investments that increase the cost of a break in loyalty the longer the rela-
tion has been in effect. Even if the asymmetry of the relation protects the
identity of the dependence relation, one cannot escape the fact that the pro-
tector’s position relative to the client is not that of the free man relative to
the slave. In fact, what the patron derives from this relation is essentially
based on an international system in conformity, in both structure and dis-
tribution, with its own values and interests. In no way is this an absolute
mastery either of events or of the daily elaboration of external policies.

Clientelism takes, of course, many forms. The dissimilarity of the situa-
tions in Chad, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Vanuatu is evident. It would be a
mistake, though, to think that the clientelist relation functions only to
unite the Northern countries to the least developed Southern ones. The oil
boom, while enriching countries with abundant natural resources, has not
only modified but perhaps even aggravated dependence situations, as can
be seen in the notion of the rentier state. This notion applies to “any state
/ that derives a substantial portion of its revenues from foreign sources in
the form of rent.”*° This financial source provides from 70 to 98 percent of
the revenues in states as different as Algeria, Libya, Iraq, and Iran are from

30 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

Saudi Arabia. The main effect is to increase very substantially the auton-
omy of the state relative to its social actors, since the quasi-totality of | the
revenues comes from sources external to the society. The effect of oil on
the economies and the sociopolitical life of the producing countries can
thus be compared to that of gold in sixteenth-century Spain. The economy
of rents encourages passivity in the elites and facileness in the states.”

The passivity of the elite, which sets the tone for everyone else, is easily
understandable. Rather than undertake the exertions of productivity, they
find it much easier to buy large quantities of goods from abroad. Rather
than adopt entrepreneurial behavior characteristic of Weberian asceti-
cism, everyone else finds it better to enjoy the lucrative activities of a ren-
tier bourgeoisie, dividing one’s time between financial speculation and the
acquisition of sinecures in the high-level state bureaucracy. The logic of
dependence is here largely reconstituted. By distancing itself from the
work of production, especially by abandoning the agricultural sector to buy
from abroad, particularly Australia and New Zealand, the rentier bour-
geoisie in Iran has noticeably increased its dependence on the exterior. By
abandoning the basic functions of production to an immigrant elite in or-
der to specialize in the financial management of rents, the Saudi elite has
achieved the same result.*?

By choosing the easy way, the rentier elites have only intensified the
same logic. The abundance of foreign revenues makes taxation seem a
most meager source of income. In fact, in a short-term rationale, taxation
becomes counterproductive, a hindrance to neopatrimonial strategies that
encourage the prince to profitably ally himself with potentially rival elites.
The nationalization of oil industries, far from diminishing these effects,
only intensifies them, since on one hand, it encourages a more direct and
immediately available substitute for tax revenues and, on the other, it en-
‘ courages the formation of an entire state bureaucracy whose best posts are
held by the elite. In this light, the perverse consequences of nationalization
appear manifest. While nationalization supports, albeit symbolically, the
will to resist mechanisms of dependence, its realization and especially its
subsequent implementation reinstitute the effects of dependence. The na-
tionalization of Iranian oil by Mossadegh in 1950 falls more in the context
of rivalries internal to the Iranian political system than that of interna-
tional relations. By promoting symbols of nationalism, Mossadeghism
sanctioned even more the will of a young, Western-educated technocratic
elite to become cogs in the political machinery rather than to work for a
genuine national independence. Nothing up to this point presented a fun-

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 31

damental challenge to the clientelist relations cemented with the Northern
states. On the contrary, the enterprise augmented and diversified the net-
work of potential clients by promoting their access to an entirely new state
bourgeoisie.

The rentier state, for its part, is strengthened in its relation with others
by policies of allocation and distribution. The augmentation of its re-
sources allows it to increase its public expenditures, to improve its credit,
to reduce its investments, and thus tangibly reinforce its legitimacy—or in
any case its effectiveness—by establishing a genuine policy of well-being
and, for the best-off among them, by providing numerous free services.
Here too, however, the results are ambiguous. The rise of providence states
in the shadows of oil derricks also reinforces dependence, and even the
submission of society to the state, since the former is not strengthened
along with the latter and has no means at its disposal to reclaim control.
‘Thus constituted, the providence state, financed by external sources, de-
pends on the exterior and finds in its policies of generosity the means to
more effectively exercise its own clientelist and patrimonial control over all
social spaces.

We must, however, be careful here. In relative terms, the rentier state is
far from being the most effective condition of well-being. On the contrary,
the differences are patent. If one compares their ranking in terms of GNP
to that of the highest indicators of human development (IHD), most of the
rentier states are seriously behind. For example, Saudi Arabia loses 37
points, Kuwait 30 points and the United Arab Emirates 43 points. This loss
shows that most of the rent is not used in social expenditures but rather di-
rected toward nonproductive sectors and those external to society. Even if
in 1988 Kuwait did spend a record amount of $536 per capita on human de-
velopment, this amount was only 4 percent of its GNP, whereas Zimbabwe
spent 12.7 percent, Malaysia 6.4 percent, and Costa Rica 5.4 percent. Glob-
ally, in r990 the IHD placed Kuwait in 48th position, behind Mauritius,
Gabon in 50th position, behind Albania, and Saudi Arabia in 69th position,
just after Guyana and Tunisia. Life expectancy in Saudi Arabia (64 years) is
less than in Vanuatu (69.5 years), in Cape Verde (67 years), and in Algeria,
Turkey, Tunisia, and Brazil (65 years).** All this just goes to show that a ren-
tier economy, even a very successful one, does not necessarily lead to ex-
traordinary levels of development and that, in any case, the results are not
sufficient to draw the countries in question away from dependence rela-
tions. In fact, based on the foregoing data alone, one can conclude that ren-
tier policies encourage and strengthen dependence more than diminish it.

32 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

Other indicators easily confirm this view. Demographically, most of the
Gulf states have understood the conditions of their dependence, being
more and more the recipients of support and a skilled workforce from
abroad. Choosing primarily nonproductive employment, the Saudi elite
abandoned the most important positions to engineers and technicians
from elsewhere, in particular from the Arab world. Studies of these immi-
grant populations reveal that, with the exception of a minority, they do not
identify principally with their status as citizens of the Arab worlds rather,
the most skilled and competent among them identify first of all with either
their company or a value system dominated by moneymaking, technocracy,
and secular cosmopolitanism.** In sum, the social logic of a rentier econ-
omy promotes a socialization of the elite toward Western cultural referents
and precipitates their integration into social networks dominated notably
by numerous clubs centered on loyalty to Western countries, where they, in
fact, obtained their university education.

Economically, most of the indicators of dependence remain with the
state: the commercialization of oil escapes the producer nations to remain
essentially with the large corporations; Arab capital is for the most part
managed by Western banks, most of which are American; most of the food
is imported; technology, both in oil production and selected efforts at in-
dustrialization, is almost exclusively Western in origin.*° In each of these
domains, the forces of dependence control the strategies of the rentier and
bureaucratic elites who profit from them.

All these elements extend into foreign policy, where they reconstitute
the entirety of clientelist logic. The dependence of rentier states on mili-
tary equipment produced in North America is practically total. Thus their
sphere of activity, even in the very heart of their own region, is basically at
zero. The Gulf crisis of 1990 and 1991 showed this very clearly; the ability of
Saudi Arabia and its allies to react was directly a function of American en-
gagement on their side. The clientelist relation is particularly evident here:
the obligation is clearly reciprocal, since the technological and military de-
pendence of the Gulf states reduces in turn the autonomy of the United
States, who, if it refused to intervene, would inevitably jeopardize the
soundness of its client as well as the credibility of its patronage. By empha-
sizing this reciprocity of obligation, clientelist logic is closer to reality than
the simple dependentist hypothesis. At the same time, the patron’s obliga-
tion can be stronger than the client’s. Saudi Arabia could remain deaf to
American injunctions during the October 1973 war or during the Camp
David accords because it knew that diverging from political agreement on

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 33

the foreign front was not sufficient to jeopardize the protectionist efforts
that American diplomacy had for decades worked to establish. At the same
time, American insensitivity to the Iraqi threat in the Gulf could have led
the Arab states to consider American patronage of little consequence.

By neutralizing, within the limits indicated, the variable constituted by
economic development, the example of the rentier states gives a clearer,
more exact idea of the forces of clientelist dependence. For the client-
dependent, such dependence presupposes access to an international system
whose technical, cultural, and symbolic skills it has not mastered. Conse-
quently, it implies loss of sovereignty and the incapacity to act auton-
omously both on the international scene and in the elaboration of internal
policies of redistribution. For the patron, this dependence presupposes not
only a vigorous policy of allocation to its client but also a tangible reduction
in its choices in the sphere of foreign policy. Though it maintains its sover-
eignty over the nature of the values allocated, it loses these values by defini-
tion at the very moment and by the very intensity of its allocation. The ex-
change mechanism sets in motion a twofold consequence. The example of
the rentier states shows first of all the importance of material and symbolic
accouterments: the strategy of the Southern princes is to derive a maximum
of gain from this relation in order to make it acceptable to public opinion.
The productive countries can effectively help with this requirement. Setting
in motion social policies, often more imaginary than real, supplying state-
of-the-art technology, donating sophisticated but often unusable military
equipment in the absence of an active patronage, are so many elements that
obscure the reality of dependence and even allow for the socializing of a
population, that would otherwise object, to a genuine feeling of national
pride.

The second consequence needs to be more individualized, since it aims
to motivate the leadership ranks to be part of the circuit of dependence. Ef-
forts on the part of the patron are, from this point of view, far from negligi-
ble and extend to the university education of future elites through their
preferential incorporation into the international system. More precisely,
these groups receive from such a situation the possibility of attaining par-
ticularly lucrative social positions, either by profiting individually from a
rentier economy or by integrating themselves into the sociopolitical sys-
tem by obtaining remunerative and prestigious bureaucratic positions, but
which are in fact devoid of any responsibility or real power. In Kuwait, no
less than 55.3 percent of the working population are in the bureaucracy.*°

More generally, the force of clientelist dependence is to engender within

34 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

the subjected societies a category of leaders who have obtained from pa-
tronage positions of dominance that, as they quickly learn, could not be im-
/ proved upon by promoting an alternative, nationalist strategy. Even more
precisely, these leaders strengthen their position as client when they estab-
lish by experience that their own power is truly reinforced by exercising the
role of “domesticators” of foreign aid. The conjunction of these negative
and positive elements of appreciation tends to found the strategy of “client
sovereignty” experienced by the former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkru-
mah.*” Nevertheless, this conjunction accounts only for the purely utilitar-
ian dimension of the actions of the Southern princes and their entourage;
for this reason, it does not entirely explain their behavior.

Dependence Beyond States

A new dimension has recently been added to the sociology of international
power, notably by Susan Strange, whose works go beyond the mere rela-
tional to reveal the substantive nature of the phenomena of global power.*®
Classical imperialism, based on coercion and on the relations of direct ad-
ministration, has failed: the colonial empires counted on the mobilization
of resources that have not only been devalued, but that many consider to
have backfired against those who formerly used them. The dismantling of
the French and British empires, then that of the Soviet empire, has shown
that the very meaning of power and the means of obtaining it have changed
profoundly. From a Weberian perspective, power designates the capacity to
impose one’s will on another. Integrated into the study of international re-
lations, this conception privileges the idea that states acted coercively,
with the goal of enlarging their spheres of influence. Colonial and imperi-
alist logic remained linked to an age-old vision of conquest, where to dom-
inate meant first of all to administer a vast territory. Neocolonialism dif-
‘fered from this construction in form only. It assumed that there would be a
continuity from the administration of the dominating state to that of the
dominated state, which could transcend the effects of a merely symbolic in-
dependence. Fundamentally, the presence of the dominating state re-
mained territorial since it was felt precisely and exclusively through the in-
termediary of the client state on the client state’s own territory.

The growth of transnational exchange has seriously shaken this model.
More and more, the resources of power move from place to place, ignoring
borders, confounding sovereignties, and bypassing states. From an inter-
state world, the contemporary international system has evolved toward the

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 35

“multicentered world” mentioned by Rosenau.*? In a certain light, it also
occasionally resembles what Hedley Bull calls the anarchic society-the ero-
sion that affects the sovereign omnicompetence of states and the actual
reduction of centers of power, both of which are results of transnational in-
flows.*® Whether these inflows are cultural, economic, religious, demo-
graphic, or in the realm of communications, the problem is fundamentally
the same: these centers increasingly acquire powers that, by definition, es-
cape the control of states and tend to exist outside any territorial support.
From this point of view, the ability to control the diffusion of technical
knowhow, to regulate the circulation of money, or to morally or politically
influence a religion are not resources that can be investigated through a
purely interstate approach to dependence.

American hegemony is largely made up of these bases. Having in the
past suffered imperialism in its classical form, the United States has incon-
testably constructed its “neo-imperialist” power by seeking successfully to
master these inflows. Beyond state patronage, the United States has based
its power On its capacity to extend credit, to determine whether to encour-
age or fight inflation in the world economy, and also on its mastery of
knowledge, of research, and education of the elite, on its mastery of com-
munication, as well as on the worldwide use of the English language, on the
generalization of marketing and management models developed in its own
universities, and on technological and military means of assuring its secu-
rity. These means allow for the exercise of authority over the populace

_tauch more than over governments and, eventually, to bypass states if their
leaders hesitate to accept American diplomatic orientations. It is clear
from this point of view that the range of nationalist and anti-American
strategies deployed in the 1960s with the initiative of the great figures of
nonalignment, such as Nasser, Sukarno, and Nehru, found its limits in the
effectiveness of this approach to power exercised directly on the populace
and the elite. Taking charge of the socialization of the latter is particularly
important, for it explains, among other things, the fact that the intermedi-
ary technocratic elite tends to contain anti-Western pressure, as did the
young executive class of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who were for the
most part educated in American universities and thus spoke English and
based their future careers principally on their American educations.

Of course, the mastery of cultural inflow is more difficult to understand
and evaluate.*! However, the domination of American press agencies, of
television programs made in the United States, of trends in music, cloth-
ing, and cooking are far from being without effect, though one should not

36 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

underestimate the importance of the selective and critical receptivity of
communication inflow. Investigations have even shown the boomerang ef-
fects produced by the diffusion of certain American television programs,
notably in the working-class suburbs of Santiago, Chile, during Allende’s
presidency. No matter how important these reactions and the resulting
variations are, they do not diminish the importance of the inflow. At most
they displace the locale of their impact to affect the middle classes more
than the rest of the population, since the former look more to Western cul-

Aural models to assure their own social standing and particularly their inte-
gration into the state bureaucracy. This phenomenon has been observed
particularly in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.

The mastery of religious inflows is more difficult to integrate into this
type of analysis. On one hand, they are by nature more autonomous than
the others, both in the context of their production and in the control of
their orientation. A neo-imperialist policy can more easily be built by a ma-
nipulation of inflows in finance or the media than by those of a religion. On
the other hand, they are more likely to be endogenous and to function pre-
cisely as a protection against the diffusion of transnational influences com-
ing from the North. From this point of view, the role of Muslim religious in-
fluence is particularly significant. However, the renewal among most all the
Protestant sects is clearly part of this neo-imperial context. The archbishop
of Guatemala, Monsignor Prospero Penados, himself stated in January of
1989 that the United States supported “non-Catholic groups . . . to consol-
idate [their] economic and political power in Latin America” because “the
evangelists defend an individualist conception of eternal salvation that co-
incides fully with the position of liberalism and capitalism.”** Without tak-
ing the conspiracy thesis too far, and especially without forgetting that most
of these sects arise within the ambient cultural context, it must be ac-
knowledged that they are in a line of development that, in its origins, blends
with American cultural history and that they are trying to supplant a Ro-
man Catholic Church from another culture’s history and value system. It is
difficult to establish the effects of this countersocialization; it is also just as
difficult to deny that it can be integrated into the transnationally inspired
neo-imperial model.

_In any case, it is certain that the double disconnection between power
and territory, and between power and interstate activity favors a new inter-
national order that privileges the United States in relation to Europe, and
formerly in relation to the Soviet Union, and that easily complicates the
problematic of dependence; This problematic designates a system more

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 37

than relations among states or, more exactly, makes states and interstate
relations only the components of this system; it also noticeably reevaluates
the role of mediator played by all the other actors in the diffusion and re-
ception of transnational influences that emerge as the principal compo-
nents of a system of dependence.

The Deceptions of Sovereignty

Whatever may be the methods and mediations by which it functions, the
dependence relation is first of all political and is part of the deceptions of

“sovereignty. Dispossessed directly or obliquely by a social network beyond

‘its control, the dependent state must deal with three types of deception,
each having to do with three sectors essential to its sovereignty: the diplo-
matic function, the coordination of socioeconomic functions, and the or-
ganization of public space.

eg

The deception of the diplomatic function is probably the oldest and derives
directly from traditional state logic and paradigms of power. The first man-
ifestations of one state being taken control of by another lie most often in
the dominating state’s efforts to dismantle the dominated state’s expres-
sion of sovereignty internationally. The treaty of 1814 between Britain and
Persia thus had the principal function of sealing Britain’s promise not to in-
tervene in the internal affairs of Persia, in exchange for the shah’s commit-
ment to let no foreign power traverse its territory other than Britain and,
especially, to fight its Muslim neighbors in the case of an Anglo-Afghan
conflict.** Similarly, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the goal
of the region’s great powers was to establish direct relations with the lead-
ers and tribal chiefs in order to break up monopolies and disrupt the diplo-
matic functions of which the shah of Persia or the khedive of Egypt took ad-
vantage| Inversely, but by the same logic, diplomacy was frequently used to
encourage a direct intervention of the Western powers in the internal so-
ciopolitical lives of the dominated states. Diplomacy was freely utilized to
obtain precise and concrete engagements from the Muslim sovereign that
would benefit the foreigners and Christian minorities who were his re-
sponsibility. In a treaty between Siileyman the Magnificent and Francis I in
1535. the sultan exempted from taxation the French people residing in the
Ottoman empire; at the same time, bilateral engagements with each of the
Western states established the right of international protection that there-
after benefited the diverse Christian communities, the interdiction against

24

C™

38 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

condemning to death Muslims who converted to Christianity, and the alle-
viation, even the disappearance, of legal inequalities that differentiated the
Muslims and Christians within the empire. Similarly, the installation by in-
ternational treaty of the capitulation system recognized, in 1569 for France
and 1601 for England, the right to remove their own nationals from Ot-
toman jurisdiction and consign them to the judicial authority of their own
consuls.** The progressive extension of this practice to protected minori-
_Aies, even to those Muslims who requested it, quickly led to the constitution
of a foreign state within the Ottoman state, as in the Persian state and many
others as well, and to effectively dismantling the logic of sovereignty.

The deception of diplomacy is thus at the very center of the logic of de-
pendence. Very ancient in its achievements and very clearly preceding even
the practice of colonization, it constitutes one of the most evident basic el-
ements, since on one hand, it follows from the imbalance of power and, on
the other, it leads to a progressive increase in the dismantling of the domi-
nated state’s sovereignty. In the evolution of capitulations, there is notably
no clear limit between the recognition of exorbitant rights accorded to for-

ign communities and the establishing of consulary control over the prin-
~ cipal political functions of the dominated state. For this reason, the decep-
tion of diplomacy quickly becomes an instrument for other ends, laying the
groundwork, in particular, for colonial domination.

In the postcolonial era, the same ambiguity remains, even if the unani-
mously proclaimed will to go beyond and castigate outdated practices leads
to even more subtle distinctions. The diplomatic function is used more in-
formally, in such a way as to maintain a facade of sovereignty for the domi-
nated state. It is distinguished from intervention more clearly in the inter-
nal workings of the sociopolitical order, which freely takes other paths to
its ends. As a judicial mark par excellence of state sovereignty, the diplo-
macy of the weak state is no longer taken over by the strong state through
unequal treaties or the practice of capitulations, but by the common appli-
cation of clientelist logic: the dominating state becomes the patron state

_through an image of itself as the bestower of a rare resource that allows it to
obtain, in turn, the dominated state’s participation in or support of its
diplomatic goals, particularly within international institutions or in the
context of regional military conflicts.

This logic can also allow for a similarly unequal process of exchange, but
in contrast to the clientelist relation, it is not durable and does not consti-

‘tute loyalty. The evolution of China’s attitude in the Gulf crisis resembles
the use of Chinese diplomacy by the United States, based on an inequality

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 39

that created a de facto dependence. The People’s Republic did not initially
hide its hostility to all military intervention against Iraq, and several offi-
cial delegations went from Beijing to Baghdad to communicate this posi-
tion. Even so, China did not veto Resolution 678 of the Security Council,
which expressly authorized force. However, on the eve of this debate, Pres-
ident Bush announced his intention to receive the Chinese minister of for-
eign affairs, Quian Quichen, to whom he accorded an audience a few days
later. At the same time, the United States decided to no longer oppose a
loan of $114,300,000 by the World Bank to China to stimulate its econ-
omy, particularly in the areas of technology and rural industry. Also, it is
well known that annual loans of about two million dollars had been granted
to China before the repression following the “Beijing Spring” and that the
international community, led by the United States, had decided to end
these loans to punish the Chinese government for its policies.*°

The logic of dependence appears here in three aspects. China, which
cannot finance its development alone, needs foreign aid and thus needs to
integrate itself into the international community, for which it must make
concessions either by changing its internal policies or by reorienting its
foreign policies. To choose the first of these options, including the turn
taken by the events of Tiananmen, would require its current leaders to step
down, whereas the second option would obviously require less drastic ac-
tion. As important as it is, a concession made in foreign policy was thus
more acceptable and more rational: it would require in any case that the
Chinese government abdicate part of its diplomatic sovereignty, in ex-
change for a minor accommodation on the part of the United States, by
which, on the material level, it would pay its share of a collective financing
and, symbolically, by justifying that the moment had arrived to lift sanc-
tions. Sino-American relations reveal the same inequality of obligation that
one finds in clientelist relations, and thus here one finds the essential char-
acteristic of all dependence relations.

Yet dependence does not stop at a simple claiming of diplomatic sover-
eignty. China’s vote on Resolution 678 does not indicate only the reorien-
tation of China’s diplomacy and of its declared principles and policies. It
inevitably implies a loss of credibility with its privileged partners, particu-
larly in the context of an attempted reopening to the third world. For that,
this reorientation involves the risk of dissolution or at least the weakening
of its own sphere of influence and its clientele. Even if China had never
been a protector of Iraq, its public determination not to stand for a policy
of force strongly discredited the value of its patronage in light of its vote on

40 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

Resolution 678. So beyond a timely deceptiveness in its own diplomacy,
China passively witnessed a situation of dependence that led to a loss of the
power capital that would allow it to accede to the role of patron state.
Finally, the vote on Resolution 678 was not an ordinary political act,
since it created precedence and pronounced on the meaning of interna-
tional morals. By associating with it, China played a role in both the defini-
_hon of the right of intervention and in the construction of what is explicitly
seen as the beginning of a new normative international order. Its,vote thus
helped obscure, even to abolish, and in any case to eliminate the conflict-
ual nature of international relations on which it had based one of the fun-
damental principles of its foreign policy. By thus joining the international
community and its order, China clearly proclaimed that the abandonment
of diplomatic sovereignty is the price to pay for receiving material support
from an international integration in which it plays a role in name only.
This deception in the diplomatic function’s normative dimension is one
of the more important, and one of the most stable, marks of the depen-
dence relation. Diplomatic conformity clearly constitutes one of the surest
ethods a weak state can use to protect itself and is a more rational choice
than recourse to speeches and protest. Consequently, inter-African orga-
nizations and each of the African states individually have made a special ef-
fort to develop procedures for the transition of power, to invoke territorial
heritage based on the colonial era, to proclaim the inviolability of borders,
and to claim the right of independence and national sovereignty.*° In the
vulnerable situation in which the dominated state invariably finds itself,
the minimal guarantee of the right to the status quo seems the best strategy
against temptations to restructure the international order according to cri-
teria external to the Western conception of the state and the political ge-
ography that results from it. That is how it has been with the numerous
failed attempts to reconstitute the Umma or to form a federation among
several African states. The logic of dependence causes conformity and con-
servatism to predominate over protest and challenge, thus promoting the
continuation of an international order whose active denunciation would be
too risky for any state acting alone. It is in this perspective that the South-
ern states appear as the most active and assiduous supporters of interna-
tional institutions and that one finds in Africa, for example, the greatest
number and the greatest density of international governmental organiza-
tions, each fastidiously reproducing the logic of the state as well as inter-
national law as it is currently constituted.

*

A . THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 41
bs

The deception of socioeconomic functions of states is an initially more dis-
creet mark, but one that increasingly entrenches the logic of dependence.
In postcolonial situations, its role is crucial. While overcoming or circum-
venting formal independence, it leads the dominating states to successfully
incite the dominated states to manage their socioeconomic environments
in accordance with the rules of a market economy and those of neoliberal-
ism. We know from Polanyi that both have their own histories and cultural
foundations. We also know that most non-Western societies are character-
ized by a complex network of informal and community-based economies
that are not easily reducible to market logic. We know too that the impor-
tance of the public economic sector derives in part from the neopatrimonial
strategy of the princes, but also in part from the need to eliminate under-
employment among the newly elite. Finally, we know that the policies of
government funding for basic necessities, though representing a significant
financial burden, contributes significantly to maintaining social peace.
However, the evolution of aid policies in developing countries has tended to
upset these givens by ignoring, for the most part, the social and cultural pa-
rameters at work in these countries. The failure of economic policies of bi-
lateral cooperation sanctioned in the early 1980s the rise of multilateralism,
which gave the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
(IBRD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) basic economic super-
vision of the dominated nations. This transfer of jurisdiction led these two
Anternational institutions to impose, in exchange, certain accommodations
with a strongly neoclassical orientation. From the essentially political ne-
gotiations that reflected their interstate nature, dependence was changed
henceforth into an economic type of interaction. Aid depended on the dom-
inated nation’s agreeing to structure its economic landscape in conformity
with the views and options of the most developed Western countries. The
resulting type of dependence has two aspects: the procedure tends to give
the South the heaviest burden of accommodation to a world economy in a
generalized crisis; it also leads the Northern countries to influence national
choices of the South and to transfer to them their models of economic de-
velopment at a pace all the more rapid and dramatic the less developed a
given country is considered to be. Exportation toward the South of models
forged in the North tends to accelerate the more inappropriate these mod-
els are, thus creating a vicious circle.“
This vicious circle is, it seems, easily activated, since the combination of
multilateralism and drastic readjustment appears to reassure and to inter-
est each of the patron states individually. For example, the budgetary costs

42 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

of bilateral aid and its relative ineffectiveness have led the European coun-
tries to accept this new practice, though seeking to amend it in a manner
more formal than real. The Brussels Commission thus had the Council of
Ministers adopt a resolution, dated May 31, 1988, that supported a har-
mony between development and accommodation, though the concrete
conditions of such a unity were never established.** Britain seemed com-
mitted to encouraging those states in its sphere of influence that have most
clearly opted in favor of accommodation policies; whereas France, initially
somewhat critical, seemed to go along with the resolution all the more be-
cause, since the multilateral institutions took charge of such drastic ef-
fects, its budgetary constraints seemed to have lightened and thereby re-
vived its own bilateral aid on more effective and profitable bases. 49 Far from
being perceived as incompatible with state patronage, adj ustment policies
set in place at the multilateral level have been experienced as a functional
complement that partially relieves the patron state from the heaviest share
of the financial burden while ultimately allowing it to profit most fully from
its function as patron.

For these reasons, the “IMF policy” reflects the shape of a new type of
dependence that completes, rather than surpassing or negating, the clien-
telist type of dependence, and introduces a sharing of the tasks. Multilat-
eralism promotes an increasing intervention by the Northern countries
into the socioeconomic lives of the dependent states, the diffusion of mod-
els of development, and a greater, more vigorous interference in their
economies because of the greater possibilities for anonymity multilateral
action offers. In addition, the maintenance and reorientation of bilateral-
ism permits a consolidation of the advantages of political dependence “on
more solid grounds.”* Thus leaders in the Northern nations seldom pay at-
tention to informed criticism of accommodation policies. \These policies
are criticized for being recessionist; for causing enormous social costs,
among others in the areas of health and education; for worsening poverty
in the most disadvantaged classes; for disrupting production destined for
local consumption, notably traditional agriculture; and for increasing un-
employment in conjunction with the reestablishing of public services. |

The solidarity of these perspectives and the internalization of this com-
plementarity appear, moreover, quite clearly in the policies of cooperation
set up by the patron states. In its aid policy to Latin America, the American
government insists explicitly on the condition of debt renegotiation, linked
directly to a restructuring of the economy and the deepening of diplomatic
loyalties. Thus, in December of 1990, George Bush was able to assure Pres-

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 43

ident Menem that Argentina would profit from the Brady plan and that its
foreign debt would be reduced; he also praised the reorientation of Argen-
tinean economic policies in the direction of free exchange, of privatization,
of an opening to foreign investment, and also the positive results for Amer-
ican diplomacy by two warships sent to the Gulf. The orientation toward
Brazil is comparable, as can be seen in American support for the Collor
plan, which also supported privatization; the new Brazilian head of state
opted simultaneously for a much more conformist diplomacy than that of
his predecessor, José Sarney, who for the first time in Brazil’s history paid
an official visit to the Soviet Union.”

The combination of bilateralism and multilateralism maximizes the pos-
sibilities of the deception in the socioeconomic functions of states while
being compatible with the survival and deepening of clientelist relations.
In sum, this combination prolongs dependence through images: policies of
restructuration and policies of accommodation have not only organized a
certain type of regulation of the international economic system and cer-
‘tainly of maintaining economic dependence in the Southern nations by
subjecting them to inequalities in the treatment they receive as a response
to the international crisis, but also and especially of promoting the univer-
salization of the liberal model and presenting market economy as the only
economy possible. Behind this triumphant neoliberalist victory lie all sorts
of rhetorical variations about the end of History: the extinction of the com-
~peting economic models at a moment when those African nations with so-
cialist leanings appeal to the IMF; the convergence of economies toward a
single model; the legitimation of dependence, henceforth perceived as the
normal expression of an obligatory reference by all the developing nations
to the economic order conceived and practiced by the most developed
Northern nations| Diplomatically, this orientation constitutes the surest
defense against offers of patronage by other nations, whether they be from
China or the former Soviet Union.

The evolution of the Maghrebian countries, Tunisia and especially Al-
geria, exemplify the movement from an interventionist and even socialist
economy toward a progressively liberal model that would seemingly bring
about political and diplomatic changes as well. With its Sixth Plan of 1981,
Tunisia called for a “liberalization of its economy, a loosening of strict con-
‘trols, and a strengthening of the mechanisms of liberalization.” With the
following plan, private savings were encouraged, particularly for starting
small and medium-sized businesses, which, for the first time, accounted for
50 percent of investments. Thus the state began a reform of the tax system,

\

44 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

moving toward the decentralization of economic decision making. In July
1985, legislation of public enterprises was effected that increased their
number from 307 to 500. Similarly, the state ceded numerous assets in or-
der to hasten its withdrawal from economic activities. Finally, as a final end
to the incentives instituted by the IMF, President Ben Ali decided on Au-
gust 12, 1989, to raise the prices of certain products by ro to 15 percent, no-
tably the price of bread by 14 percent, in order to move toward true market
values.°” ne

Thus the “global model of socialist development” that Habib Bourguiba
had ordered Ahmed Ben Salah, in 1962, to set up with the purpose of better
marking Tunisia’s independence from France, had clearly come to an end.*°
At the time, this change was important and was considerably orchestrated,
notably by the subsequent transformation of the Neo-Destour into the DSP
(Destourian Socialist Party), a move that clearly marked its anti-imperial-
ist, anticapitalist, and leftist orientations, while the Zain (President Zain Al
Abidin) confiscated land owned by former colonists. In the 1980s, the logic
of dependence clearly favored a reversal: entering the ranks of a neoliberal
economy, Tunisia found itself deprived of one of its marks of independence,
whereas the state recomposed its economic functions in a way that at last
clearly affirmed its conformity to the international economic system.

The parallel transformations experienced by Algeria are even more sig-
nificant. There, the reference to socialism was even more marked, and Al-
geria’s role in the affirmation of national identity and in the construction
of its diplomacy was much more clearly defined. The visit by the president
of the World Bank to Algiers in July 1989 was the culmination of an ex-
tremely significant process. With the five-year plan begun in 1985, the

Atate was required to withdraw from the economic machinery, leaving it to

other agents, enterprises, and households. Private savings were openly en-
couraged. The private sector was recognized and even given crucial func-
tions, since it had to meet the “essential needs of citizens, of exportation,
of contributions to the creation of jobs, and regional development.”*4 At
the same time, state farms were ended and a new economic policy was put
into place that, without espousing the radical characteristic of the Tunisian
model, tended to valorize the same neoliberal orientations. The political
implications of this evolution were evident: Algeria had to accept the rec-
ommendations of an international institution that it had previously de-
nounced as imperialist; as a result, it had to modify its economic land-
scape, adopt a Western model of development, and renounce the socialist
symbolism that was the sole doctrinal mark of its identity as a nation and of

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 45

the NLF. As a result, the NLF found itself adrift, which left the field free to
Islamic protest. Yet this reorientation was accepted and even desired and
effected by a new technocratic generation, who found in the shift toward
liberalism a means to deny its responsibility for a failing economy and to
open itself to the exterior in order to gain new advantages. Thus the de-
ception of the socioeconomic function of the Algerian state resulted from
both external pressure and expectations from within. The evolution to-
ward economic conformity was supported by common interests, which in-
creased its chances for durability.

This logic resulted in a convergence of Maghrebian economies, which
was immediately echoed on the political front. The homogenization of so-
cioeconomic structures promoted the construction of the Union of the Ara-
bic Maghreb, officially founded at the February 1989 summit in Marrakech,
precisely in the context of economic restructuring. Each partner followed
the same process. Having already set up a liberal economy, Morocco in-
creased privatization and the withdrawal of the state while reactivating its
stock exchange. Mauritania, under the injunction of the IMF, abandoned
its shares in the banking and industrial sectors. Even Libya did not escape
this logic, since in March 1987 the government turned away from its former
policy, putting an end to state monopoly of industrial properties; concur-
rently, small businesses liberalized and a small sector of PME (Petites et
Moyennes Enterprises) appeared. In their use of models and solutions that
became commonplace and increasingly similar, the governments of the re-
gion revealed their awareness of the dominant orientations of world econ-
omy, which resulted in a parallel restriction of the breadth and significance
of their own political identities and a renunciation of intent to create their
own particular distinctions and political visions. This dynamic of conform-
ity, which engendered one of convergence, promoted the establishment of
negotiations with the actors on whom the future of new economic policies
depended: the IMF, the World Bank, the United States, or the European
Union, whose unification constituted another element of constraint for the
Maghreb.

The deception of the functions of institutional innovation preceded the
other deceptions and covers, by extension, the entirety of dependence log-
ics. European aid to Egypt had thus been subordinated during the financial
crisis of 1876 to constitutional reforms that instituted notably the principle
of a taxation vote by the Egyptian parliament, which conformed to a model
initiated by Western constitutional history. Almost one century later, An-
war Sadat abandoned Soviet patronage and turned to the West in order to

46 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

deal with the aftermath of the October 1973 war. He thus set up the condi-
tions of a multiparty system that succeeded the single-party system and
adopted the Western pluralist model.

These more or less forced alliances can be analyzed for their symbolic
function, since they appear immediately as the mark of patronage, an es-
sential element in the enunciation of the exchange at work between the pa-
tron and its client. For this reason, institutional conformity appears to be
formal before it is real: the client states of the Soviet Union quickly set up a
single-party socialist system and incorporated Marxist symbols; the client
states of the Western democracies took on parliamentary institutions that
were most often artificial and integrated into their representative system
principles that established the separation of powers and cultivated sym-
bolic references to their tutelary state.

Beyond this gesture, which is a privileged element of the logic of de-
pendence and probably even its manifesto, the dynamic of political imita-
tion merits consideration at two other, more serious and more crucial lev-
els of analysis: asa sign of the cultural attraction exerted by the institutional
models of the Northern countries, as if revealing the strategies of an actor,
and the strategies of the dominated society’s elite who reap benefits and re-
sources from their function as importers of symbolic and institutional
goods from the dominating states. These two properties are united: the uni-
versalist claim of the Western model of government would remain merely
formal if it did not develop a particular meaning or were not noticeably
echoed within the elite of the Sout. For the strategy of importation em-
ployed by the Southern elite would attain neither the same level of per-
formance nor the same meaning if it were not reinforced by the very content
of the institutional products imported: actor and culture are two indisso-
ciable elements of sociological analysis.

| For these reasons, forming the political-institutional system has a sepa-
rate status. By acquiring the diplomatic function, the dominant state pro-
ceeds by instrumentalization; by acquiring the socioeconomic function, it
constrains its clients to enter into an international economic system in
which it derives maximum material advantages; on the other hand, by ac-
quiring the function of political and institutional design, the dominant
state acquires no immediate resources, but is content to activate an inter-
national conformity that aligns a multicultural world along the lines of its
own model. The inequality resulting from dependence can be appreciated
in two ways: in terms of the unequal chances of each culture to inspire and
‘control social action and innovation within a particular collectivity, and in

THE LOGIC OF DEPENDENCE 47

terms of the unequal performance of social collectivities more or less ham-
-pered by the obligation to fashion themselves according to external cul-
tural models.

This double paradox, which is probably the basis of the logic of depen-
dence, illustrates its essentially political character and separates the effects
of structure and the effects of manipulation that make it possible, and fi-
nally and especially, determines what constitutes the clientelist relation be-
tween dominant states and dominated states. The paradox thus brings to
hight the essential elements of a problematic of dependence: What is the
foundation of both the universalist claim and the impulse to export the

“Western model? What principle drives the importation strategies prac-
ticed by the leading actors of dependent societies?

2. The Universalist Claim
of the State

A\Y hat sociology says about power can also be said of dependence: the less

it operates by coercion and constraint the more effective and dynamic it is;
As with any relation of domination, dependence finds its surest support in
the fact that no one actively promotes it, either intellectually or politically.
In reality, it is tautological to argue that Western models of government are
universal, since of all political orders, only the state proclaims itself uni-
versal, and it does so with a postulate it cannot divest itself of since that
postulate is perceived by everyone as constitutive of its definition.

The Invention of the Universal City

As any typological exercise will show, the state is the only form of govern-
ment that systematically impugns all particularist identities. The Greek
city grew out of individual groups that created its identity, which it in-
tended to perpetuate.’ Patrimonial monarchies constitute themselves on
the particularity of their dynastic center. Empires construct themselves
around a specific culture that they intend to defend, promote, or possibly
expand But the universal is nothing more than a fictional and uncertain fi-
nality, realized precisely by negating the culture of the other. Finally, seg-
mentary systems constitute the simple, nonmediated realization of a com-
munal social order, and thus they are built essentially on the particular.
[The state works completely differently. It is constructed in direct refer-
ence to reason and can claim nothing short of universality, nor can its func-

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 49

tioning principles aim at anything other than reducing the variety of polit-
ical orders that make up the international system. Since, in contrast to all
other entities, it implies an autonomy in its political sphere and the forma-
tion of a public space different from civil society, the state becomes com-
plete only by distinguishing itself from the singular, whether that be private
interests, specific religious groups, or community groups. This position is
not only intellectual, for its truth is borne out in the daily activities of the
state and through its functioning within an international system that re-
flects its own image.

In terms of legitimacy, the reference to reason constitutes a threefold
rupture from the past. First, it constitutes a hierarchy that places the state
at the summit of all categories. Corresponding to the origin of the state as
a model, rational-legal legitimacy is in essence superior to other formulas
of legitimacy and has led diverse sociological traditions to associate the
state with modernity. Moreover, the use of reason introduces the formida-
ble arguments of convergence and the end of History. As the only govern- (*
mental formula to conceive of itself explicitly as outside the singular, the
state can only be a generalized entity among the entirety of cultural entities
by representing “progress” and by entering the Comtian positivist stage.
Daniel Bell had already enunciated this thesis in the 1960s; it reappeared
thirty years later in the writings of Fukuyama.” Reason inevitably triumphs
over history, commanding the field, setting to flight all other types of social _
construct. Finally, science and the state inevitably fit into a transitive rela- ey
tion: the state does not defend itself as being a good political system, but
rather as being the logical choice for all efforts to diffuse knowledge.

Reference to public space carries the same dynamic. The state derives
part of its identity from its ability to abstract politics from society, to con-
struct itself apart from society, in its own space. This is the reverse of the
imperial order, which supposes a total fusion of politics and society} This
work of differentiation is also an attempt to emancipate traditional and par-
ticularist allegiances; and based on that emancipation, it inevitably con-
siders itself the source of progress, of new rights, and especially, because of
the allegiances that characterize citizenship, the producer of an egalitarian
and universalist conception of political relations. Human rights thereby
become rights of humans and of citizens and are presented as universal
rights. Since it effaces singularity within societies, the construction of pub-
lic spaces seeks to efface differences among societies: by presenting itself
as both emancipatory and individualizing, it becomes a universal way to re-
compose social bonds. In these conditions, all community resistance, all

50 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

expressions of allegiance other than that of citizen inevitably become a re-
gressive resurgence of the past. Culture itself is displaced: from an expres-
sion of identity or collective consciousness, it is reduced either to a formula
of legitimation of the political system under the term “political culture,” or
simply to a residual principle abandoned to anthropological curiosity.
Western political science is a valuable tool for verifying these hypothe-
ses. The culturalist adventure has significantly oscillated from the desper-
ate attempt to resuscitate the ideas of the founding fathers of-this disci-
pline and the militant will to envisage culture as a means of reproducing a
model of civic integration, found notably in the Anglo-Saxon behaviorist
trend. The influence of Durkheim and Weber resulted in culture being rel-
egated to premodern forms of government. Following the French thinker,
sociology in effect assimilated culture and religion to valorize the sacred as
a “shorthand expression of all collective life,”* but also to accept that the
modern state indicates the “retreat of the Olympian gods” and the substi-
tution of a new form of integration in place of integration by means of cul-
ture.* Sociologists who followed the German thinker distinguished the
blueprint of The Protestant Ethic, which noted the production of thought
dominated by reason, from religious categories, which, according to Tal-
cott Parsons, constituted “culture-niches,” genuine impasses of social
modernization.$ In such constructions, cultural analysis is strangely con-
fused with the analysis of distant “cultural spheres,” since, but for rare
exceptions, cultures proper to Western societies were neglected other
than to study phenomena of resistance among minorities or subcultures.
Strangely, Weber and Durkheim present the same enigma to their com-
mentators. Weber fully developed the logic of his argument in 7he Protes-
tant Ethic with his assertion that (“only the west had at its disposal a judi-
cial system and an administration of such a high degree of legal and formal
perfection,”® thereby leading his followers to present not only Protestant
culture but, in fact, Western culture as the chosen culture that draws its ex-
ceptional status from its exclusive capacity to attain the level of reason. \
With this assertion, Weber discounted the validity of comparing ey
systems based on the concept of culture, because he considered the state
an order of domination founded on both culture and reason, with culture
being able only to explain why, in other histories, the state did not form.
Culture thus became a residual way to explain events that could not be
based on revivalist propositions, and which could conceive a modernity
proper to Islam or to Indian culture. Similarly, Durkheim detects an even
more evident dilemma. In Division of Labor in Society, he analyzes the re-

Ul604"7
THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 51

treat of religion and the progressive triumph of a secularized state as well
as an individual morality, whereas in Formes élémentaires, where he pro-
poses that “almost all social institutions are born in religion,” the cultural
explanation prevails.’ Again, the acceptance of Western modernity is, at
least implicitly, confirmed; the force of the cultural explanation fades be-
fore an analysis in terms of the universal.

The reversal affecting cultural analysis since the 1960s has been very
significant. While the Africanists and the Orientalists have conducted their
research in terms of identity, the political scientists in the West have taken
an opposite direction. For them, to study a culture consists in researching
/the system of attitudes that could be universalized and, thus, assure the
model of modern government a maximum of stability and integration. For
example, Almond and Verba defined the contours of a civic culture, which
saw the allegiance of citizens as very concrete, and also allowed for a classi-
fication of different societies in terms of performance, in which Britain
held first place and Mexico practically the last.® Similarly, studying Nor-
way, Harry Eckstein did not try to grasp the cultural foundations of the
Norwegian political system as much as he tried to establish the outlines of
a system of attitudes with the greatest potential to support the stability of
democratic institutions.”

Beyond even the idea of culture, all aspects of political science attempt
to validate the progression of the Western models of government toward
universalization. Long the dominant approach, the systematist tradition
employed a transcultural representation of political relations that included
typologies only to classify types of systems in terms of their political capac-
ity. Technically, modern political interaction is all the more effective be-
cause it is neutral and because it makes ideological references abstract,
whereas culture in this type of construction can function only when it rein-
forces the capacities of the system. This is precisely why such authors as Lu-
cian Pye and Gabriel Almond consider secularized political orders as de-
veloped, that is, as those in which the sacred gave way to reason and a
political technology deriving from the state. |

It is definitely because of such a postulate that the concept of political
development came about. This concept was meant to describe how the uni-
versal was realized within non-Western societies, but it also interpreted as
inevitably transitory—and thus functional-the manifestations of authori-
tarianism that structured the political life of developing societies. Though
severely criticized and less and less accepted by the scientific community,
developmentalism nevertheless had definite political influence because of

52 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

beneficial exchanges between the leaders of the Western world and those

identified as “non-Western” or “developing.”

Developmentalist political science presents a double advantage for the
Western prince, that of super-legitimizing his order and justifying the con-
stitution of an international system based on his legal system and its insti-
tutions. For the prince of other societies, it opens considerable strategic
perspectives." First, it legitimizes his recourse to authoritarianism, a sac-
rifice as functional as it is inevitable, in order to arrive at democgacy. In ef-
fect, it allows for variations in participation caused by varying levels of ca-
pacity attained by the political systems. Furthermore, developmentalist
political science offers the possibility of attaining legitimacy by being a
bearer of modernity, as a means of support against representatives of tra-
ditional resources of power. Though traditional authority is difficult to
delegitimize, it can be weakened or limited by the active mobilization of an
entire arsenal of modernizing symbols that disqualify any power seeking to
exist on the periphery. Finally, and paradoxically, developmentalist logic
allows the leader to point at the constricting effects of the gap between
modern and developing societies in order to denounce publicly the prac-
tices of dependence and the socioeconomic failures it brings. This skillful
combination of an apologetic developmentalism internally and a denunci-
atory developmentalism externally is found frequently in African and Asian
societies. It can be detected in Nasser’s 1955 discourse conjointly denounc-
ing feudalism and imperialism, in that of Félix Houphouét-Boigny when he
sought to legitimize his power by ideas from the modern state that disqual-
ified the representatives of traditional authority, and also by the explicit
challenge from the Western states and their inability or their refusal to sup-
port the trading price of raw materials."!

he tangible effect of this strategic convergence was to export the state
model as a form of government, but also and especially to reconstruct the
international scene as the exact image of state logic. The discourse of Le-
viathan combines precisely the elements of a sociological hypothesis that
takes account of the process by which the state is invented as well as that of
the philosophical discourse that legitimizes universal reason. |
The sociological hypothesis shows through clearly in Hobbes’s famous
chapter 17 of Leviathan, “Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a
Commonwealth,” when he affirms that “the final cause, end, or design of
men, who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others, in the introduc-
tion of that restraint upon themselves, in which we see them live in com-

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 53

monwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more con-
tented life thereby.”'* This functional requirement is satisfied by the
“covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man
should say to every man, / authorize and give up my right of governing my-
self, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give
up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner.” “* Thus
Hobbes’s response to the functional requirement that he had posed takes up
the proxy formula, which clearly includes all the characteristics that sociol-
ogy generally ascribes to the state. First, the differentiation of the political
sphere, which is based on the very specificity of its functions and on its exis-
tence as a site of remission. Second, the individualization of social relations
having the individually rational character of this remission. That character
is the precedence of citizen allegiance, which is almost a tautology, since
this allegiance is guaranteed by the exchange of advantages that occur be-
tween the individual and the republic, known, therefore, as “mortal God.”®

Moreover, this sociological hypothesis can be verified twice over. Em-
pirically, works by late medieval and Renaissance historians in Europe
show that the hypothesis describes rigorously the very process of construc-
tion of the state, the context of endangering the security of both goods and
people, the practice of abdication formally approved by the social actors,
weakened nobles, bourgeois concerned with the security of the market-
place, and peasants affected by the uncertainties of nascent rural migra-
tion. In particular, this hypothesis corresponds manifestly to changes in the
social structure, when one establishes how the Western state was born from
_ the impoverishment of communal structures, notably village communities
and familial communities, and from the inability of civil societies to give
full measure to their associative structures.’

Philosophically, Hobbes’s hypothesis supposes that recourse to a proxy is
the only formula able to satisfy the protection requirement. However, soci-
ological analysis concludes otherwise: community constructs of the social
were durable and presented an obstacle to any conclusion of the Hobbesian
pact, while supplying other possible ways to provide security. Thus the
community is perhaps conceived as the prime place for the protection of
the individual, since history at the end of the Middle Ages shows that the
state imposed itself precisely because of the inadequacy of village and fa-
milial communities.” Hobbes seems to reject this hypothesis when he spec-
ifies that “[nJor is it the joining together of a small number of men, that
gives them this security; because in small numbers, small additions on the

54 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

one side or the other, make the advantage of strength so great, as is suffi-
cient to carry the victory; and therefore gives encouragement to an inva-
sion.” !® By establishing this point, the British philosopher falls incon-
testably into universalist logic, whose traces can be found in a number of
traditions: Ibn Khaldin, for example, shows the devastating effects of co-
hesive communal groups when they lead tribes to attack and conquest. On
the other hand, conclusions offered and the solutions practiced do not
seem universally shared, since this same Ibn Khaldin considered that the
principles of the state’s reconstruction lay-in- cohesive communal groups:
By stipulating that the organizing principles of social bonds had a greater
chance of guaranteeing social order than completely altering them and re-
placing them with other bonds, the Maghrebian writer acted as a sociolo-
gist, opening a debate that would long remain compelling. Echoed by con-
temporary anthropologists, he saw paradigms that receive considerable
interest even today: in the work of Clifford Geertz, in his reference to tribal
_Adentity in Arab towns, or in that of Gellner with his idea that the loss of
communal identity in cities implies the establishment of substitutes that he
describes as clientelism or, in Morocco, as sharifism.”°

Sinologists too have noted that the current vision of the Chinese impe-
rial, bureaucratic, centralized state gives only a partial idea of sociopoliti-
cal reality, and probably even the least relevant part. After the third-
century B.c. experience with legism, the Chinese imperial order initially
took the form of a communal and antibureaucratic ( fengtian) government
in which politics was not built on an abdication of communities, but rather
by establishing a correspondence of communal, familial, and peasant life
with the imperial center.’ Each dynasty could install its power after a more
or less explicit pact between the new political center and the reconstruc-
tion of rural familial communities. The Tang dynasty elaborated an agrar-
ian ordinance that redistributed land so that each familial unit had not only
the resources it needed but also the necessary surplus to enable the pay-
ment of taxes, which in turn supported the empire. There was nothing
Hobbesian about this agreement. It did not sanction an exchange of liberty
for security, nor did it produce sovereignty, but it did assure social har-
mony, whose maintenance alone guarantees that the imperial dynastic cen-
ter will endure. Moreover, in such a model, the political function is almost
_entirely submerged in the social order. Far from having its own resources,
the imperial center has value only through its capacity to benefit from the
mobilization of communal structures; far from commanding priority in cit-
izen allegiance, it must incorporate agrarian communities within itself; far

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 55

from constructing itself on a remission of individual liberty, it must protect
the equilibrium between its own intentions and those of social communi-
ties. To have power in this context does not mean to intervene, to act, to
transform, but rather to be the one exempt from deciding.

This model, seriously shaken by both its own decay and the increase in
westernization, was gradually replaced by a centralized state bureaucracy
( junxian) separate from society and dissociated from economic life. Since
this model contains certain elements of traditional legism that had pre-
dominated in the early period of imperial China, but since it is also related
much more obviously to the Western state tradition, this model recom-
bines several givens of the Hobbesian pact: the construction of a differen-
tiated and sovereign political space and the individual’s direct allegiance
to the political center, thereby forming a complex bureaucracy. But Yves
Chevrier has shown that this model did not definitively succeed.” For its
part, the Maoist system tried to reconnect with the old fengtian tradition
by basing itself on peasant mobilization, on the dissolution of political
~ functions in social spaces, and on the reconstitution of an economic and
political differentiation from the system implemented by Deng Xiaoping,
which seemed, in contrast, to be aligned with the junxian model.\Deng
clearly relied on the state, economic decentralization, and the rebirth of a
market distinct from a bureaucratic power, which relies on citizenship.
Better still, he sought to correct the results of crumbling social control by
turning to nationalism, relying on the regression of both Marxism and tra-
ditional cultures. Importing a key element of the Western grammar of
modernization allowed for the reconstitution and completion of a model
resembling Hobbesian universalism.

Sociological analysis, therefore, does not confirm the universality of the
Hobbesian pact. More precisely, it shows the variety of social pacts, in-
cluding as many individualist formulas as communal ones. Far from disap-
pearing, the latter are recomposing and redeploying, whereas actors seek-
ing political effectiveness must seek to integrate rather than efface them.
More precisely, non-Western models, and in particular the example of
China, suggest that individualism and communitarianism can either com-
plement each other or alternate with each other according to different po-
litical regimes, as in communist China. Unless one considers these mani-
festations as residues of tradition that, as such, should be dismantled by
modernization, one has to admit that they form a competing model of alle-
giances not integrated into the Hobbesian construct and whose deficiency
constitutes a direct attack on the legitimacy of the political system.

56 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

Thus, Hobbes the sociologist shed light on the context in which the
state could be invented. As a philosopher, he placed this perspective firmly
in a normative theology that added another aspect to his pact: |the inven-
tion of the state does not occur relative to a context, but through an opera-
tion of reason, In Hobbes such an operation appears beyond human nature,
which borders on the predatory, and at the same time, beyond religion,
which entails another type of obedience. Hobbes defines reason as the or-
der of addition, of calculation, of researching the consequences-=as leading
to the domain of science. Moreover, the domain of science is precisely
where Hobbes places the social pact, established specifically as a calcula-
tion by man to neutralize the harmful consequences of his passions. Hence
the scientific identity of not only the state but of all mechanisms of obedi-
ence that Hobbes attributes to it. Not only has rationality been confirmed
by the Enlightenment and then embraced, as we have seen, by the socio-
logical tradition, but since the end of the eighteenth century it has been
identified as such by intellectuals and political actors of the non-Western
world. Because of its technological successes, the West has been able to
prevail as the“‘civilized world” and has made itself accepted as the agent of
positivist knowledge and the disseminator of science. We can note that the
first exporters belonged to different rationalist and positivist currents in
nineteenth-century Europe. Other currents were also instrumental: Free-
masonry spread pretty much everywhere, first in Persia and the Middle
East; Saint-Simonism was a strong presence in Egypt as of 1830; and posi-
tivism enjoyed considerable currency among the Young Turks.” Similarly,
in China Western science appeared well before other concurrent philo-
sophical traditions. As of the second half of the nineteenth century, the
creation of the first foreign language institutes in Beijing, Shanghai, and
Canton accompanied the formation of technical schools attached initially
to naval shipyards. Likewise, missionaries accomplished the same diffu-
sion of scientific knowledge, while the first Chinese students were sent to
Europe and the United States for training in industry and medicine. At the
same time, the integration of Western and Chinese mathematics was be-
gun.*4 This scientistic vector was all the more effective in China because it
Aéd to the diffusion of a remarkable evolutionist thought through the work
of Yan Fu (1852-1921), who had been educated by one of these schools, the
Arsenal of Fuzhou, and trained in the British Royal Navy. There he read
Darwin and Spencer, studied British law and administration, and trans-
lated into Chinese the works of evolutionist philosophers, as well as John
Stuart Mill and Montesquieu. It was specifically in this scientistic context

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 57

that Western political ideas and the first institutional models penetrated
into China. Similarly, the Appeal to Youth of Chen Duxiu (1880-1942), who
was educated in France and later headed the Chinese communist party,
draws on the Western spirit of enterprise.”

Scientific justification for the invention of the Western state and West-
ern technological hegemony combined to support this vast movement
abroad. \This explains why the nineteenth century was a turning point in
this process and the very moment when the universalist claim of this entire
production had the greatest chance of being ae But the essential is
sull missing: in these few examples, the Western model of government had
already been imported, by the new elite governing non-Western societies,
both those in power and their intermediaries. As important as it may be, in
practice the sociology of proselytism explains only a small part of this dif-
fusion; some background is required to understand this issue. Rather than
a concerted effort of the Western states, this diffusion reflected the de-
_Mmands and strategies of the elite, who were often educated in Western val-
ues, but who generally acted not to further Western interests, but rather to
realize their own objectives, which usually involved emancipation. These
actors worked in concert less than could be supposed a priori. Their non-
governmental, humanitarian, or religious organizations, their Protestant
or Catholic missions, their scientific, Saint-Simonian, or Masonic organi-
zations—each one acted autonomously and in its own interests. Given the
nature of the diffusion from the mother country by its university and cul-
tural institutions, official joint organizations played only a minor role.

The Westernization of the International Scene

Westernization occurred systematically as the Western states transformed
the international scene in their own image. Contrary to certain hypothe-
ses, the Western state is not the product of a new international system. We
now commonly acknowledge that it originated in the workings of late me-
dieval rural societies, and this has replaced the idea that it originated in the
international system produced by market capitalism in the Renaissance.
On the other hand, the state profoundly influenced international relations,
all the more decisively as the nation-state emerged more and more within
the context of the globalization of international life.\At least three axes of
this process can be counted: the diffusion of the principle of territoriality,
the diffusion of a normative system strongly marked by the Western con-,
ception of law, and, finally, the diffusion of international rules of conduct,

58 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

Territorializing the World

The principle of territoriality often eludes critics because it seems so obvi-
ously universal. It is a decisive component in the actions of the state, but it
is, nevertheless, linked to a historical development. As an essential ele-
ment of the contemporary international system, it collides head-on with
several other histories and a number of other cultures. Though present-day
international relations conform more or less with the interstate‘model elu-
cidated by Raymond Aron, they were initially constituted by the forced uni-
versalization of the idea of territory.”° But throughout history, the distinc-
tive features of this idea were based on several characteristics. First of all,
it assumes that the community’s social logic becomes secondary. In the
state order, territory becomes a functional category of political regroup-
ing, for such a regrouping implies that individuals will submerge their
identity based on their allegiance to a center that seeks to monopolize au-
thority. In that, the logic of territoriality contradicts the communal con-
struction of the social; when the latter is valorized, membership in a tribe,
clan, or extended family makes territorial identification ambiguous or de-
batable. Inversely, such an identification becomes operative when all in-
termediaries between the state and the individual disappear, that is, when
territory becomes the geographical unit of the notion of public space. An-
thropology and historical sociology understood this process of individual-
ization only when it began to affect Europe in the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies, precisely at the moment feudal logic weakened and the Western
idea of a defined territory took form.”

Territory, then, represents the superseding of feudal logic. In feudal
logic, territory does not have the same meaning, for it represents neither
identification nor primary allegiances, and it never had the finite and in-
stitutional character that statehood could confer. It has also been shown,
notably by Norbert Elias, that feudalism played an essential role in the pro-
gressive construction of the idea of territory and, especially, in its conver-
sion from being an individual resource guaranteeing the protection of the
_Aeudal lord, into an institutional resource favoring state domination.”®
German sociologists have, in effect, explained how competition between
feudal lords unequally endowed with territory led to armed conflict and en-
couraged the victor to claim monopoly and dominion over the Coriquered
lands. To this extent, the feudal structure institutionalized territory polit-
ically for the first time by making it both the essential condition of domi-
nation and of political identification and the exclusive indicator of sover-
eignty exercised by each ruler. The state moved beyond a hierarchical

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 59

system that invested territory with a relative political significance to a con-
struct that made territory an absolute, which became the only means of as-

suring its authority. In this sense, the invention of territory in its present
configuration is linked to the Western feudal past.

Similarly, territory surpasses imperial logic, which itself is based on the
notion of a nondefined territory. The empire exerts a strong tension be-
tween the particular and the universal, between reference to a specific cul-
ture and the will to extend that culture; so by definition, it unfolds onto a
noninstitutionalized territory without fixed limits. The Omeyyad and Ab-
basid empires derived from a dar al islam, that is, from a part of Islam not
totally reducible to a geographical category. In Christendom, the em-
peror’s renown extended beyond the limits of his territory proper, into the
entire Christian world, strengthening the legitimacy conferred upon him
by his possessions. In the Chinese empire, the border meant merely the
fringes beyond which lay wilderness, and these fringes, by nature unstable,
could not constitute a defined space. Within empires, however, lived dif-
ferent cultures and peoples whose identity included not reference to terri-
tory but rather to religion (cf. the m//et in the Ottoman empire), to lan-
guage (in the Chinese empire), or to political status; and citizenship in the
Roman empire referred neither to place nor space, but to a political act.
Until the Edict of Caracalla in the third century linked citizen and land for
the first time, the imperial order dissociated territoriality and civil status.

Territorialization also surpassed Western rural society. Without falling
into too simplistic an evolutionism, one can, in fact, make use of the con-
junction of national territory and progress in market economy. The latter
supposes a modification of political spaces. If too vast, empires risked sti-
fling merchant circuits and damaging the autonomy of civil societies and the
market; if too small or if fragmented, city-states or groups of cities risked
hindering commercial trade and fitting poorly into the nascent economic
system. This developing system powerfully transformed Europe, so much
that the level of nationhood achieved became the universal measure of po-
litical systems. Thus in the processes of its own constitution, civil society
upholds the principle of territoriality. The undifferentiated economy of
communal structures was clearly unable to support the construction and le-
gitimation of territory. Economies based on affinities, to which Goran Hy-
den refers in his analysis of East African societies, limit social exchanges,
enclose economic functions in communal structures, and devalue the role
of the local administration—all of which deprive the territory of potential to
evolve into a genuine political entity.”

Incontestably, only state logic can confer on a territory its clearest politi-

60 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

cal identity. The completely constructed state tends to institutionalize, even
to make sacred, the idea of a defined territory. The state is complete only by
appropriating all intermediary allegiances, by defining citizenship as the di-
rect subjection of the individual to the political center. Only here can terri-
tory remain a legitimate indication of this relation, which must be unam-
biguous. Furthermore, it must give rise to a jus loci that, little by little,
supersedes the jus sanguinis, and it must establish juridically intangible bor-
ders. Such was the case with the entities that grew out of the Peace of West-
phalia; the same occurred throughout the mutations affecting the European
kingdoms at the end of the Renaissance, when the very notion of markets
had disappeared. The vagueness characterizing territorial identity in Lor-
raine until 1766 faded with the principle of a henceforth closed territory.

This construction of territory claims to be universal and has, in fact,
made itself universal. The contemporary international system is thought of
and conceived as a function of this principle, which requires that every ac-
tor within it belong to a defined territory. It is precisely because of the fic-
tion of territory that the Catholic Church claimed membership as a legiti-
mate actor on a level with nations; it is by claiming a territory as their own
that dominated collectivities, whoever and wherever they are, can univer-
sally claim legitimacy for their cause. This alignment forced on Western
history created uncertainties and tensions that clearly reveal the limits of
such an exportation.

The contemporary uncertainty surrounding the territorial system is due
to two series of factors: first, the persistence of communal cultures that
continuously challenge or alter the system; second, conceptual differences
at work within various cultures that assign a meaning to the idea of terri-
tory that contrasts sharply with the idea developed and exported by West-
ern culture. The hypothesis of a communal culture has often been pro-
posed, and is based on the postulate that, beyond their diversity, communal
social structures share a common network of meanings that distinguish
them from others. These principles are in fact numerous: community is the
principal provider of identity, allegiance, territorial landmarks, and sig-
nificance given to land.

As the primary, even exclusive, provider of identity, the community does
not easily lend itself to territorial constraints. The Tamil conceive their
identity in terms of community, either by reference or by recourse to reli-
gious or linguistic markers: with its Sri Lankan citizenship directly chal-
lenged, Tamil identity has to be expressed in a territorial language that si-
multaneously betrays it and radicalizes it even more. In fact, territory and

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 61

communal identity have never harmonized in the island’s history, a situa-
tion that affected dramatically the conditions of an eventual partition.
Hindu Tamils and Sinhalese Buddhists used to coexist on distinct geo-
graphical bases, with the Tamils staying in the north and east, and the Bud-
dhists in the center and the southwest. Immigrants from either group could
integrate into the other through a caste system. Such is essentially the
process of territorial design contrived by British colonialism, and commu-
nal duality set the stage for future conflicts. In the twentieth century, terri-
torial unification carried out by the colonizers stimulated mobility among
certain minorities, whereupon the Jaffna Tamils moved to the south and
the British farmers hired Tamil coolies to work in the island’s center. This
heightened competition between groups, as well as the competition pitting
them against Christian proselytism, only heightened the communal stakes
according to a rationale of division that helped the colonial powers manage
the whole of the territory. At the same time, the imported model of major-
ity rule and representative government, effected by Home Rule, led the Sin-
halese nationalist leaders to encourage antiminority sentiments.*° This
logic became common after independence and radicalized the Tamil par-
ties, which moved from federal demands to separatist ones. Hence at the
end of the 1960s, the Federal party became the Tamil United Liberation
Front. At the same time, the rise of a liberal politics marked the decline of
the welfare state, which was at least in communication with all Sri Lankan
citizens.*' The resulting discomfort led to increased emigration by the
young Tamil elite, complicating even more the territorialization of the
communal problem by extending it to the Tamil Nadu in India.

The territorial nature of the problem thus became unworkable and con-
tradictory. Since the Tamils were considerably in the majority in the north,
they acquired a de facto autonomy. On the other hand, in the east, where
they were mixed with other communities, their mobilization evolved into
an unresolvable civil war over a dispute that had no territorial solution.
Clearly in the minority in the center, they became embroiled in commu-
nalist fights orchestrated by the Sinhalese. This impossible territorializing
of the Tamil question totally undermined projects of autonomy or spatial
arrangements, thus radicalizing the situation and sanctioning the creation
of separatist movements that resorted to violence.

The same tensions between identity logic and territorial logic can be
found in the Kurdish problem. Until the end of the eighteenth century, this
tension did not exist, since Kurdish identity was wholly integrated into a
communal tribal order. At that time the Kurdish tribes were grouped into

62 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

confederations or emirates, such as those in Bitlis, Jazira, or Rawandaz,
and led by men chosen from noble lineages and assisted by councils com-
posed of tribal chiefs, a small bureaucracy, and a light army. This arrange-
ment could be relaxed because certain tribes existed outside a confedera-
tion, composing tactically beneficial alliances whenever needed. Political
integration was not strongly based on territory because the collectivity was
nomadic and, during seasonal migrations, it let Armenian and Nestorian
peasants cultivate its pastures. The absence of territorial identification was
compensated for by communal integration and by easy negotiations be-
tween the emirs and the Ottoman and Persian governors. It was also com-
pensated for by identification with the Sufi sects, notably the Naqshbandi
order, which united the groups in a common bond.”

The construction of a state from the Ottoman empire, begun by the sul-
tans at the end of the eighteenth century, combined with the already per-
ceptible effect of the presence of states on the international level, undid all
these facts precisely by promoting an unmanageable territorializing of
Kurdish identity. In his capacity as head of state, the sultan could no longer
tolerate either the authority of the Kurdish emirs or the continuation of
communal allegiances that might prevail over subjection to the imperial
center. As a result, the vali(s), governors, tried to forcibly integrate these
emirates into the Ottoman territory. And in particular, since it had taken
up practices that were henceforth territorial, the Ottoman administration
tried to settle the Kurdish population, thereby inciting intense competi-
tion between sedentary cultivators and the former nomads, between Ar-
menians and Kurds, in which the latter engaged in raids against Armenian
villages. In the context of confrontation between communities, Kurdish
identity became a source of conflict, making territory both an object of dis-
cord and a mode of identification burdened with intercommunity tensions.

At the same time, the Treaty of Erzerum (1847), which ended the war be-
tween Persia and the Ottoman empire, supported the insertion of the re-
gion into an international system codified by the rules in effect among
states. As the first treaty that genuinely conformed to public international
law, it established a delineation and institutionalization of borders that
from then on prevented Kurdish tribes from benefiting from the impre-
ciseness of territorial structures. Similarly, Russian-Ottoman rivalries re-
activated Armenian claims of autonomy as well as the hope of promoting
their identity by a confrontation among states.

The demand for a free Kurdistan also resulted directly from the univer-
salization of the Western conception of territory as supporting a political

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 63

order. This demand was to become an insoluble problem. Raised after the
Treaty of Sévres, it encountered several obstacles that remain today. The
very idea of a Kurdish territory was contradicted by the overlapping of dif-
ferent communities on the same land; moreover, the Kurdish peoples were
unable even to agree on a choice of representatives at the negotiating table.
Such contradictions between tribal order and state order account for the re-
current and almost consensual process of elimination or marginalization of
the Kurdish issue internationally by actors in other countries. The territo-
rial solution to the problem progressed only when it became embroiled in
political interactions internationally: after World War I, when the Ottoman
empire was divided into different countries; and in 1946, with the creation
of the ephemeral Republic of Mahabad, which the Soviet Union hoped
would give them access into Iran. With the Kurds or the Tamils, territory
limits rather than supports the expression of identity; it complicates the re-
alization of identity rather than providing a solution to the problem.

For similar reasons, communal culture has equally hindered the move
toward territorial affiliation. The example of the Kurdish political organi-
zation reveals a subservience system that bears no relation to territory.
Even more clearly, the example of the people living in former Spanish
lands of the Sahara reveals the uncertainties and other effects of blockages
deriving from the reference to territory. Initially, at the time of decolo-
nization, the Spanish government intended to concede autonomy to West-
ern Sahara; but this provoked an immediate reaction by Morocco, who also
claimed sovereignty over this territory. Understood this way, the Interna-
tional Court of Justice distinguishes with absolute clarity between the ideal
of allegiance and that of territory. While it accepts that bonds of allegiance
exist between the sultan of Morocco and the Saharan tribes, the ICJ rejects
that these constitute bonds of sovereignty between the territories of Mo-
rocco and Western Sahara. The reason for this lack of correspondence is
clear: before colonization, Morocco was not the only political entity exist-
ing in the region, and the Sahrawi tribes belonged to a “Chinguiti group,”
that is, the communal tribal structure localizable in the environs of the
Chinguiti oasis, currently situated in Mauritania.**

Such a decision derives from the importance given to the Saharan prob-
lem. Certainly, in practice, it reflects a refusal to become involved in the
dispute between Morocco and Mauritania, and prevents efforts to find a le-
gal solution to the problem of succession to Spanish rule. Thus the deci-
sion sanctions the inability of international law to decide a dispute that
weighs seriously on contemporary Maghreb, and thus to enact universal

64 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

rules. Yet the essence of the problem does not lie here: by agreeing to the
hypothesis of a “Chinguiti group,” the court broke with a problematic
founded on the universality of the state. Past or present, such an entity car-
ries consequences that directly affect the contemporary international or-
der; by distancing itself from rationality based on the state, it generates ir-
resolvable tensions because they cannot be categorized in the grammar
that currently governs international relations. In particular, this recogni-
tion proclaims the normative value of the dissociation between‘territory
and allegiance. Not only does the latter constitute an autonomous reality,
produced exclusively by the interactions of the communal solidarities and
affiliation networks to which it gives rise, but especially, it cannot lead to
the recognition of any territorial sovereignty. Thus allegiance to the prince
does not imply his sovereignty over the land in question, just as political ob-
ligation can affect a population though it may lack its own territory. There-
fore, to conceive a Sahrawi identity in terms of a national territory becomes
impossible and raises an endless debate in which each of the countries in-
volved can support the same claim. To dissociate oneself from identity in
terms of territory would certainly allow a more precise definition of one’s
identity, but that makes impossible one’s integration into the international
sphere as it is today.

A comparable, though exacerbated dilemma confronts nomadic popula-
tions that find in their communal culture the only elements that can estab-
lish their territorial markers. In this case, Western territorial logic is ex-
actly inverted: only by controlling territory can one control men, as the
example of the Tuaregs clearly indicates. The Tuaregs have more than once
_ been displaced by the importation of the principle of territoriality. First, by
the colonial government, which not only disrupted the constants of the tra-
ditional economy but also organized the entire Saharan region, drawing
borders and regulating the movements of nomads. However, these had a
limited effect because colonization allowed caravans a relative freedom of
movement in disputed areas. In particular, the construction of the post-
colonial nation-state profoundly upset traditional equilibria and fixed, in-
stitutionalized, and in reality worsened the borders drawn by the colonizers.
The area traversed by the Tuareg was divided into five countries: Mali.
Niger, Burkina Faso, Libya, and Algeria. These territorial divisions reduced
the number of basic regimes of which individuals were subjects. Farmers
were no longer allowed to move with their families for the seasonal migra-
tions; they were disarmed and brought under several authorities. Above all,
territorialization set up border checkpoints that were reinforced each time

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 65

the ministers of the interior met. Similarly, signs of rejection of citizenship
within these populations were reduced, namely, disdain for the symbols of
state sovereignty, change of nationality, and unpredictability of political be-
havior, which provoked mistrust of civil servants and political leaders.*4

The failure of territorial logic could only exacerbate tensions. First, a re-
currence of armed conflicts, beginning in 1962, pitted Mali against the Kel
Adar Tuaregs. These conflicts progressively mobilized other nomadic peo-
ples, notably the Tubus of Chad, who fostered an endemic source of guer-
rilla activity that gradually became the very symbol of the fight for power
within the former French colony. As the ethnologist André Bourgeot noted,
“The impossibility of nomadic movements” tends to transform these pop-
ulations into a “lumpen-nomadic” collectivity that regenerates its identity
by a migratory flow of the young generation into Algeria and especially
Libya where they learn techniques of modern warfare and acquire the skills
and reputation of fighters.*° A twofold dynamic here affects the functioning
of political systems and can go so far as to turn armed clashes into political
rivalries that influence international relations in the region. From this last
point of view, territoriality is the more troublesome because it is a source of
indefinite blockage. By making the autonomy of Malian Adrar its principal
demand, the Azawed Liberation Front spoke the language of international
law and effectively influenced decisions, as was the case with the peace ac-
cord signed in Tamanrasset in January rgot. It failed, however, to address
the essential aspect of the incompatibility between the notion of territory
and the Tuareg conception—in nomadic terms—of the political order, which
gave force to the Libyan myth of the “Saharan State,” even though this
force had more of a utopian nature than a real, institutionalized one, and
even though, in the final analysis, it derived from the same territorial vision
of political structure. Criticism of this vision gave rise, therefore, to more
conflict rather than to a more politically modern alternative.

\ The difficulty could seem insurmountable: communal cultures confer
on land a fundamentally different meaning from that found in Western cul-
tures. Whereas the former see land as concrete and sacred, the latter con-

ceive it as more pragmatic and institutional. In the areas where the com-
- munal bond predominates, ideas of land and territory merge to designate
first of all the possession of the ancestors and then the source and spiritual
foundation of the community. Social entities and other political relations
are necessarily excluded. Taken to its extreme, this lack of differentiation
is expressed, notably in African and Native American communalism, by a
conception of nature as enchantment, where land and divinity merge. The

66 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

tendency to sacralize the earth makes its conversion into an institutional
support of anonymous and individualized political relations based on citi-
zenship all the more delicate. As a source of allegiance in the communal
model or instrument to formalize allegiances in the model based on citi-
zenship, territory reflects two entirely antinomic meanings. The national-
ist discourse of the sacralization of land that acquired currency in the West
in the nineteenth century could reduce this gap only in metaphor: the
themes of rootedness or mythical references to the “French land* sacralize
the nation more than the land itself, whereas themes of natural borders
found no juridical or sociological bases.

Discredited by the workings of communal cultures, the principle of ter-
ritoriality was also reconstructed by the system of meanings characterizing

each of the non-Western cultures. Islam supports the communal conception
of territory. As the only legitimate collectivity, the Umma assembles the
faithful and constitutes the perfect place for carrying out political functions
and expressing allegiance relations. As such, its territorialization is obvi-
ously impossible, but it also maintains an entire conception of political mo-
bilization attached to the principle of territoriality. The Muslim’s allegiance
to an order that requires his faith or his communal solidarity transcends the
law of territory; Islamic movements have often expressed Islam’s claim of
sovereignty over the Muslim communities in Europe, hence they reject the
sovereignty of European states over these communities. The Ayatollah
Khomeini did not consider it interference to become involved in the Libyan
conflict, or even in the political life of the Arab world in general, since he
considered that he was acting within an area under his guidance, no matter
what judicial considerations were at stake in the countries in question.
From this point of view, the notion of dar al islam that designates the
domain of Islam, that is, the area in which the community is ruled by an Is-
amic administration, constitutes a first restriction, since it imposes an ini-
tial division within a legitimately indivisible Umma. In terms of interna-
tional relations, this notion is in opposition to the dar al harb (“the realm
of war”), the exterior space of Islam, in conformity to a dichotomy that ac-
quired meaning when the dar al islam was unified within the imperial Ab-
basid. On this scale, all internal division could only be accidental or con-
jectural, based on some necessity. This is the diametric opposite of the
Western principle of territoriality, which endows borders with institutional
value and intangible quality. Here also stand in opposition two conceptions
of the universal: with the Western model, the universal affirmation of the
concept of territory and its divisions; with the Islamic model, the implicit

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 67

affirmation of Islam’s universalist orientation that relativizes the very
meaning of border. Any territorial division represents nothing more than a
convention, even more so since it derives most often from diplomatic and
military interactions among the great powers. Far from being whims, peri-
odic announcements of the total fusion of the states of the Arab world ex-
press symbolically a weak adaptation to nation-state status. Similarly, the
organization of such parties as the Ba’ath derive from a more or less fic-
tional national, that is, inter-Arab leadership. Finally, these announce-
ments reveal how matters concerning borders have been overshadowed by
clashes between regimes and modes for legitimizing power and by rivalries
among national leaders.

However, the problem is not clear-cut. Though the highest-ranking lead-
ers of the Muslim world resist the Western idea of territory, they must con-
tend with it. As ambiguous as it is, universalization of the principle makes
an impact, as much by exigencies within the international world as by the
benefits that leaders receive from it, notably that of promoting or protect-
ing their own hold on power. Prime Minister Mahatir has been sensitive to
the specific nature of eastern Islam and careful to build a Malaysian nation-
alism that can unite the country’s Muslim and Chinese citizens. In the
Umma he referred to the existence of several peoples, thus giving some idea
of territorial divisions. This idea was taken up by Mahamed Fadel Djamali,
former prime minister of Iraq, who confirmed the existence of a plurality of
cultures within the world of Islam, while the Moroccan nationalist leader
Allal al-Fassi did not fail to note, in the context of the struggle for inde-
pendence, the compatibility of nation and Umma. In fact, the plurality of al-
legiance networks protects against the risks of an all-encompassing single
allegiance.*° This is how territory becomes a sort of check against the dom-
ination potential of integrated cultural groups. Even more, it becomes the
necessary stage through which an entire group of political practices must
pass: the practice of emancipation from the colonial power, which is the ba-
sis of glorification of “national territory,” and the practice of the exercise
of power, which make the context of territory the site where domination
comes to an end.

At the same time, the Oxford-educated Sudanese Islamic leader Sadik al-
Mahdi observed that the territorialized state represented a lucky chance
seized by the Westernized elite to catapult themselves to power and to cre-

/ate a political community loyal to them.* Clearly, the promotion of the ter-
ritorial framework amply remunerates this type of elite. It promotes the re-
production of an imported state model that corresponds to their acquired

68 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

skills; it subsequently protects the political figures currently in power,
thanks to the valorization of its own abilities; finally, it gives the prince the
supplementary means of legitimizing himself in the eyes of his people, al-
lowing him to be the guarantor of national territory or the conqueror of new
territories. Hassan II with the Green March, Nasser with the Suez Canal,
Sadat with the Sinai Peninsula, and Saddam Hussein with Kuwait—all
played the same card with the same conviction, in spite of unequal chances
of success. ah
Arguments supporting the universalization of the notion of territory are
obviously not negligible; they find a genuine echo within the very heart of
political systems. The resulting hybrid order is not, however, without dan-
ger. The reality and multiplicity of the ways culture and society negate the
principle of territoriality provoke tensions that at the same time weaken the
legitimacy of those who use them, Still worse, they engender countermobi-
lization strategies that, in the Muslim world, fuel as many Islamic move-
ments as they do nationalist and populist ones. Thus during the Gulf crisis,
Saddam Hussein tried to combine a strategy of territorial expansion with
the call for a transnational popular mobilization, and to combine the effects
of a war between states with those of a war effort to incite populations
against the state. In this way he revived the inexhaustible potential, in the
Muslim world, of the superimposition of two worlds, that of territorial gov-
ernments undergoing the attraction of universalist principles and that of a
deterritorialized political arena obeying endogenous cultural constructs.
Like Islam, Indian culture does not adapt easily to the notion of terri-
_tory. The somewhat indistinct idea of a Hindu nationalism developed in op-
position to those who refused integration into a Hindu culture that con-
ceived of itself as a cosmogony. Such was not the case with the first invaders;
it was, however, the case with the Muslim conquerors and then later the
Western ones. The binary relation between us and other does not necessar-
ily lead to a territorial sense other than negatively. Beyond these difficul-
ties, the Hindu world never really developed as a single large group. As a
world of castes and sects, identity developed at the microsocial level. As a
world of ray, it has for a long time thought of its relation to the political only
in terms of territorial micro-entities. Since historically it knew only epi-
sodic imperial periods, the only way it could serve its rulers was through
cultural models that generally were not Hindu, but rather Buddhist (the
Mauryan empire), Muslim (the Moghul empire), or Christian (the British
Raj). Beyond these expressions, Indian culture appeared in a “galactic” po-
litical order, made up of the juxtaposition of innumerable religious, social,

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 69

and political entities that, all together, created more of a world than a terri-
tory, in which diversity found value in its relation to the unified whole.*®

This unity developed in the context of a nationalism that was for the
most part imported whole cloth, syncretically, which allowed a Hindu iden-
tity, then an Indian one, to come about in terms of a Western grammar.
This “strategic syncretism” allowed the success of reformist sects such as
Brahmo Samaj and especially Arya Samaj, which altered Hinduism by con-
erring upon it a sense of unity that provided the basis for an Indian nation-
alism: reference to the Vedas as the unique book, attenuation of the caste
system, rediscovery in Hinduism of principles founding its own modernity,
valorization of the aryas, and a call for a golden age.*’ At the same time,
Western borrowings were considerable. The founder of the sect, the
British-educated Dayananda Serasvati, was firmly attached to monothe-
ism; and from the very beginning, nationalist intellectual movements drew
from the Enlightenment philosophers and claimed as their own the idea of
a scientific state. Such was the case with Henry Louis Vivian Derozio
(1809-31), an Indo-Portuguese philosopher and founder of the Young Ben-
gal movement; and such was especially the case with Ram Mohan Roy
(1772-1833), founder of the Brahmo-Samaj sect. He served in the adminis-
tration of the East India Company and subsequently represented the Em-
peror Akbar III in London. In addition, he frequently visited France and
was a thoroughly convinced disciple of Enlightenment rationalism, which
he hoped to disseminate in India through the educational system.*° Thus
the passage from a cosmogony that considered alterity merely a poorly con-
structed identity, to a view of it in terms of a defined space, resulted from
the discovery of Western rationalism and its claim to universality. Sites
where this discovery took hold are clearly identified: ideas of unity and
monotheism, reference to a unifying book, receptivity to a science im-
ported from elsewhere, reunification of the social structure, but also the
beginning of a revivalist dynamic that nourished the themes of a chosen
people or, at least, valorized themes of the golden age and an alternative
modernity in embryonic form. Exposed to Western modernity, Hindu re-
vivalism, just like Islamic revivalism, turned to a differentiated knowledge
based on the distinction between the universal and the particular. Hence,
differentiated from a simple cosmogony, Indian identity became particu-
larist. Opened to Western rationalism, it accepted a universalism that was
historically external to it. Because of this particularity, it was henceforth
identifiable and territorializable; because of this universality, the process
of identification could take such shape as would have meaning in other cul-

70 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

tures. However, for that very reason, Indian identity requires a cultural
reinvestment that is simultaneously a source of mobilization against the
other and which can, in turn, challenge the universal order. The radical
Hindu revivalist movements, for example, illustrate this process in that, for
these movements, state and territory appeared progressively as foreign im-
ports and hence objects to delegitimize. Accordingly, marks of identity be-
come, as in the Muslim world, indirect stakes in the process of mobiliza-
tion. If, for example, the Arya Samaj could mobilize in the name of identity
and a prenationalist doctrine, and merchants find a more advantageous po-
sition than that offered by their caste, the Rashtriya movement, based on
Hindu radicalism, could integrate into its network of clandestine cells nu-
merous groups of individuals socially frustrated by modernization who
were willing to denounce the very fact of a national state.

The territorial conception of Indian identity is thus marked by a double
\tension: that which opposes the resistance of a cultural system to the uni-
versalizing efforts of another cultural system and that which creates a con-
/tradiction in the strategies of the actors, depending on whether they bene-

‘ fit or not from the cultural innovations resulting from contact with the
‘West. The daily practices of political life are necessarily affected by the
resulting instability. India’s international reputation has been notably
marked by ambiguity. The Republic of India finds its legitimacy only as a to-
tality enclosing the world of all Indians. This has been demonstrated by the
concept of limited sovereignty India has adopted regarding Bhutan, and
even more remarkably, Nepal; it has also been demonstrated by India’s in-
volvement in the defense of the Tamil cause or the impossibility of finding
a compromise to solve the Kashmir problem. Certain observers of the con-
flicts that have torn Southeast Asia see the conflict between the territorial
cultures of Vietnam and Cambodia as critical, since the first has insisted on
a defined territory and borders, while the latter was marked specifically by
an Indian cultural heritage that considers territorial delimitations as “po-

rous and mutable.”*!

Unification by Law

The normative system has the same universalist orientation as the princi-
ple of territoriality. International law was conceived in Renaissance Eu-
rope and has clearly undergone various vicissitudes and criticisms; no less
significant are the discords and tensions experienced by its history and the
contemporary, somewhat forced, efforts to revive it. The birth of interna-

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE ge

tional law is in itself significant. At the same time, the Renaissance felt the
weight of the Protestant Reformation, which contested the legitimacy of
the nascent state; of the resulting map of Europe where a juxtaposition of
states definitively prevailed over the hypothesis of a unified Christian
world; and of the opening onto the world, which supported the conquest of
the seas and distant lands already inhabited by other established cultures
with which Europe had to coexist, but which it also had to christianize. The
task, then, was to attempt a self-definition relative to the other, to seek in
this opposition another self, and to both discover alterity and reconcile it
with a universal order.*”

The simultaneity of these tasks characterizes the orientations of a law
that would at the same time confirm the status of states and be the apolo-
gist for nature and reason. International law is the law of sovereign nations
at the service of natural principles and, therefore, universal ones. Such a
school of thought could only be Neo-Thomist, in which the Dominican Vi-
toria, as well as the Jesuits Suarez and Vasquez, found in the theological
construct of the angelic Doctor all the postulates needed to reconcile na-
tion and reason, law of nature and universal law, state, natural law, and
Christianity.

The elements of the debate reveal, in fact, a grammar far from out-
moded. A missionary among the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas de-
manded that a social law be recognized from which even a non-Christian
could benefit. Thus the first clash among different civilizations that con-
fronted international law also illustrated the functional orientations of the
new law: they defined a unique normative system that could merge cultural
differences and reconcile the right to be oneself and the right to spread the
teachings of the Gospel. Here, natural law is the keystone: since natural law
blurred differences—which necessarily were unique—because it is an attrib-
ute of human nature, it is superior to positivistic law, whose function is to
manage human nature in whatever form it may take at any given moment.

Vitoria’s work provided the basis for an international law that was in
essence universalizable. If each people constitutes an irreducible entity,
what can dictate the law among different peoples if not a natural law,
uniquely expressive of the truth? If liberty is a natural law, then in situa-
tions where liberty is clearly inferior, it is effaced by the right to truth and,
thus, the right to read and to receive the Gospel: the specificity of the Indi-
ans is a fact before it is a right; therefore, their natural aspiration for the
truth prevails legally over their hypothetical will to protect their different-
ness. Similarly, colonial conquest poses the problem of safeguarding peace-

72 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

ful relations, but it cannot mask the right to well-being and development
that the right to truth assumes.

There is, then, an international order subject first of all to a truth that
represents a law of human nature. Moreover, this law does not negate the
separation into sovereign states, since Vitoria sees the state as a necessity
of natural law that succeeds a condition detrimental to individualization.
There is an evident progression from a natural order, an order of truth and
an order of the state, which assigns to the most advanced states the func-
tion of completing the structuring of the international order.

The evolution of this juridical construction is significant. The difficulty
of defining the content of this law and especially of reconciling it with the
principle of state sovereignty has led to the erection of the state into a first
principle of natural law. This is confirmed notably in the work of Vattel,
who postulated that man’s happiness depended first of all on the well-being
of his country and thus on the affirmation of the state. Here, the individual
exists only as a subject of the state, with the latter the sole actor in interna-
tional relations. This position restores a positivist coloring to international
law, since obligation in international law exists only because it is consented
to and recognized by states. The slide toward positivism is, however, de-
ceiving, first because the declared principle of state sovereignty derives
neither from a natural principle nor from a positivist construction. As we
have seen, the state derives neither from a universal category nor from a
political order empirically observed in all times and in all cultures. Next,
and especially, it is deceiving because, taken in its entirety, positivism ren-
ders ineffective the very idea of an international law deprived of every obli-
gation and every sanction.

Such absolute volunteerism has proved suitable. In certain contexts, the
conception of a nonstructured international society deprived of obliga-
tions corresponds with the interests of certain states that seek to preserve
their sovereignty and which have at their disposal sufficient coercive ca-
pacities to do so. In this spirit the Soviet Union, during the cold war and
when the Soviet Union itself was surrounded, could adhere fully to such a
construction. Also in the name of the principle of sovereignty, the Soviet
Union denounced the free circulation of people and ideas between Eastern
and Western Europe, and it rejected the right of “free radio stations” to
broadcast into its territory. From the point of view of a strict juridical pos-
itivism, the argument was solid. It demonstrated that the principle of state
sovereignty could be taken to an absurd extreme and that an international

system includes the definition of a system of obligations that transcend

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 73

somewhat the sovereignty of nations. The consciousness of this require-
ment, certainly not of recent date, helped relaunch the work of establish-
ing an international law. Kelsenian normativism” played a considerable
role in that it identified those very principles that form the basis of inter-
national obligation.

The end of the cold war and the completion of decolonization gave new
life to the idea of natural law. The decline of East European ideologies, the
abandonment of the priority given to military force in East-West relations,
and the decrease in the number of sovereign nations have given cause to
recast international relations in universalist terms. The further strength-
ening of the United Nations, and the treatment of the Gulf crisis as an “in-
ternational police” operation led by “soldiers of law,” resulted in the re-
discovery of a natural law destined to organize international relations from
which no one would be exempt. Of course, the idea of state sovereignty
must still be cultivated; a “police operation” is legitimate only when it
fights a state that has ventured outside its own territory. Of course, the
means of imposing sanctions remains uncertain, but one must allow that
discourse and practice have come together to reinvest the idea of a natural
law with its original value as a principle that, of necessity, justifies a state’s
every international initiative. Use of this universal law served not only to
legitimize action internationally but also to establish the idea of a unified
international stage, consensually organized around common values. The
ability of Western societies to produce these values, to present them as uni-
versal, and to disseminate them or impose them is the most salient feature
of the Western model’s propensity toward universalization.

This process constitutes one of the major stakes in contemporary inter-
national relations. Its feasibility is a matter of debate among two camps:
those who desire to attenuate conflicts, and who thus consider juridicizing
the international stage as eminently possible; and conversely, those who
see the activation of the North-South conflict as indicating that cultural
norms differ sufficiently to make improbable the constitution of an inter-
national law that all actors perceive as universal.*”

Analysis of the conditions in which a transcultural international law has
been constituted shows the complexity of the issue and the difficulty in de-
ciding between these two positions. On one hand, it is certain that well be-
fore the Renaissance and the explicit formation of an international law,
people in different cultures employed practices of negotiation and interac-

*Translator’s Note: Hans Kelsen, 1881-1973, political and legal philosopher.

74 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

tion that supported an empirical and utilitarian normative system that was
already quite complex. But it is equally true that with the modern and con-
temporary period, the extension of an international law claiming univer-
sality, that came from the West, and was extended essentially through rela-
tions of domination helped pile up ambiguities and root this law in an
identity constructed as monocultural.

The formation and extension of the Muslim empires instituted numer-
ous practices that were precursors of international law: the Prophet Mu-
hammad had already concluded treaties with the Jews of Medina and the
Christians of Aqaba; the Caliph Abol el-Malik had already engaged in ne-
gotiations with Byzantium; embassies had been opened in Constantinople
as well as in Persia and with Charlemagne. Whatever the empire’s claim to
universality, its insertion into a world where it confronted the dar al harb,
that is, the Christian world, brought it to consider itself as a territory: non-
Muslim warriors were issued safe conducts, and foreign merchants were
taxed upon entry into the empire.

In the same way, the third-century Chinese Han empire sent ambassa-
dors to the kingdom of Funan (Cambodia) in order to establish ties with the
empire of the Kushans. In the following century, Nanking housed numer-
ous embassies from India and Ceylon. In addition, the Cao-Wei region had
established diplomatic relations with Japan that grew stronger during the
subsequent two centuries; the Sassanid Persians sent ambassadors to the
Tang dynasty. Also, an alliance was formalized at the end of the eighth cen-
tury between the Tang and the Abbasids for protection against the Ti-
betans.** Later, in the sixteenth century, tumultuous relations between
China and Japan, exacerbated by the increase in piracy, were calmed and
regulated by subtle diplomatic moves and a succession of embassies.

Of course, within these constructions no defined international law can
be located. The very idea of a treaty reveals many ambiguities; for example,
for Muslim jurists the treaties concluded were measures of expediency and
established only a provisional agreement that, apparently, could last no
longer than ten years. Furthermore, these treaties of necessity prevented
even hypothetical sanctions and possessed no real value in the larger inter-
national order. In reality, what occurred was an international practice from
which was excluded the principle of pacta sunt servanda. Regarding inte-
gration into the international system, the actors relied on their absolute
sovereignty as a basis for an order or juxtaposition of entities in which the
only essential element was the ability to enter into contact with each other.

The apprenticeship of an international system that one could join and

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 75

even integrate with came later, as soon as relations of domination ap-
peared. The first alliance treaty concluded by the Ottoman empire linked
Siileyman the Magnificent and Francis I on an explicitly interstate basis,
since the Ottoman sultan considered the king of France as his equal and
made the treaty for an extended period, and thus not based on a temporary
necessity. Soon after, however, the right to contract treaties served to es-
tablish policies of capitulation, in favor of France in 1569 and England in
1601. The principle of the natural right to sovereignty of nations and equal-
ity among them was shaken by the logic of domination as soon as the first
movements toward constructing an international order had borne fruit.
Thus the first peace treaty in conformity with the model of international
law was imposed on the Ottoman sultan in the context of a defeat. The
Zsitva Torok Treaty of 1606, the first to effectively correspond to the formal
requirements of a document between states, carried no pretense of the sul-
tan ordering his governors to act in conformity with international accords
to which he had personally subscribed. At the same time, the Western pow-
ers continued throughout the nineteenth century to reach agreements
with certain governors of the empire and successfully convinced the Sub-
lime Gate to deal with non-Muslim representatives through its own minis-
ter of foreign affairs.** Similar events occurred in Persia, where a succes-
sion of treaties with Britain during the nineteenth century brought about a
capitulatory regime in which the sovereign government gave over natural
resources or infrastructures and limited Persian diplomatic autonomy by
forbidding, for example, any European power other than Britain to tra-
verse its territory (1814).

The way China became a part of the international system reveals in yet
another way the destructive effects of Western international law and the
circumstances that trigger it. We have seen that China’s discovery of alter-
ity is very ancient, since it was concomitant with its construction as an em-
pire. The institutionalization and formalization of the effects of this dis-
covery are more recent. They became apparent when it was no longer a
question of juxtaposition but of defining one’s own space, of specifying the
norms that attach one to the center, the significance of borders, and the re-
ciprocal obligations linking self to other. The Manchu period was well
aware of this process, since it established China’s current boundaries, and
since the seventeenth-century conquests put it in direct contact with other
actors seeking to take part in the same interactive logic and attempting to
define their own territories.

Significantly, China’s initial insertion into an international system that

76 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

was becoming worldwide occurred in a hybrid fashion, only partially corre-
sponding to international law. The peripheral territories had already inte-
grated acquired identities essentially distinct from the logic of the state, and
this foreshadowed China’s ambiguous insertion into international relations.
Manchuria was a territorial possession belonging to the Manchu dynasty in
power in Beijing. Mongolia was part of the empire only because of personal
allegiances linking tribal chiefs to the Manchu emperor. Tibet was recog-
nized as a religious center under Chinese protection to eliminate the risks
of a Mongolian guardianship. The peripheral kingdoms (Nepal, Burma, and
what was then Siam) were vassals. Only Sinkiang (etymologically “new ter-
ritory”) had the status of occupied territory with a military administration,
clearly taking part in the logic of territorialization in accordance with inter-
national law. That is how China became an international actor according to
the practices that prolonged an almost 2,000-year-old imperial logic and
which, all in all, made few concessions to an international law that it largely
ignored. As a result, China first built itself as an autonomous regional sys-
tem and as a merely potential actor in the international system. Here is a his-
torical turning point that helps explain China’s specificity as a hybrid actor
in the international scene. With its imperial identity still very real, the com-
plexity of its relations with its neighbors, Vietnam, Burma, and Korea, re-
veals a very relative conjunction of the Chinese system with international
law.*° Particularly since this conjunction began, as with the Ottoman em-
pire and Persia, on the most contradictory bases of inequality.

China’s first encounter with the Western law of treaties occurred in 1689
in Nerchinsk, when Chinese authorities wanted to record the progress of
Russian colonization in Siberia and set the boundaries separating the two
countries. Significantly, the document was written in several languages,
those of the two contracting parties, and in Latin. The discussions included
Dutch intermediaries and Jesuits, who formalized the accord. The purpose
of China’s entry into the international juridical order forged by the Western
powers was to define its relations with another empire and to stabilize a
process of conquest. Its entry was prolonged by the decrease in diplomatic
exchanges in the first half of the seventeenth century. These increased,
however, after Nerchinsk, when the Russians relieved the Dutch and Por-
tuguese by assuming more diplomatic activity. But it is the unequal treaties
that completed China’s membership in the new international order. Thus
the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 was a juridical sanction imposed during the
first of the opium wars by formalizing the cession of Hong Kong to England,
the opening of a certain number of ports for commerce, and, particularly,

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 77

modifications of China’s internal juridical order, such as the suppression of
the Cohong monopoly (Association of Cantonese Merchants) and the rec-
ognition of the right of extraterritoriality to British citizens within the em-
pire. The Treaty of Tianjin (1858) and the Convention of Beijing (1860)
combined certain international institutions of common law, such as, for ex-
ample, the opening of consulates, and the worsening of certain unegalitar-
ian dispositions that the law approved even though they contradicted cer-
tain of its fundamental principles: Chinese customs were placed under the
control of a foreigner, new concessions were opened, British textiles were
exempt from customs taxes, and foreign fleets could circulate freely on Chi-
nese rivers. In 1904, the Treaty of Shimonoseki confirmed these disposi-
tions and even strengthened them, this time to Japan’s benefit.*”

In sum, the form was largely respected: treaties were in conformity with
legal procedure, permanent embassies opened, and an international order
of integration replaced the former system of juxtaposition. More impor-
tant, Western international law had become universalized, accepted, and
recognized by non-Western partners as the procedure for regulating inter-
national relations. At the same time, however, the logic of universalization
entailed a threefold effect. First, the international system was unified
around a center that the West intended to occupy, particularly since it had
produced the system. Next, it was made uniform according to processes
that accelerated the configuration and the practice of the international ac-
tors following the model of the state. Finally, it legitimized unequal and
dependent relations, thanks to the generalization of the contractual prac-
tice of treaties. Thus the conditions of inequality and dependence were
softened symbolically by the fact that they appeared to result from the vol-
untary consent of the contracting parties, hence from their sovereignty.

The Construction of an Interstate System

This universalization of the normative system inevitably affects interna-
tional relations by promoting expansion of an underlying model of state
logic. From this perspective, the Hobbesian paradigm has acquired, inter-
nationally, the same relevance it has within each nation: practice and law
meet where principles of security and sovereignty converge. The interna-
tional order that triumphed after the Peace of Westphalia established the
transfer of the logic of violence from the individual level to the universal
one. No longer can one legitimately use force for religious motives; but that
does not exclude a state from recourse to force the moment force becomes

78 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

legal, or in other words, that recourse to force derives from a state’s exercise
of its sovereignty. The appropriation of international violence by the state
has multiple consequences both internally and externally.” For the internal
workings of state logic, the appropriation of violence constitutes a precious
reservoir of the mobilization of resources and legitimation, while intensify-
ing external insecurity provides a valued means of reactivating allegiances.
Furthermore, the state’s appropriation of violence has effectively helped to
universalize and to consolidate the state and regimes in place within non-
Western areas, such as, for example, the military action taken by India
against Goa, by Indonesia against East Timor, by Morocco during the
Green March, or though less successful, by Argentina against the Falkland
Islands. In each of these cases, the process of mobilization valorized and
diffused among the local population the primary characteristics of the
state—namely, territory and citizenship. In sum, here is an entire grammar
whose function was essentially to hasten the integration of the most diverse
political orders into the interstate system. Externally, the state’s appropri-
ation of violence orients the international system toward the elimination of
private wars. Effected with the Hobbesian pact within national spaces, this
elimination, which is of primary importance, is confirmed internationally
by outlawing and treating as renegade every violent confrontation not pur-
sued at the national level. Piracy, for example, became so intolerable that it
was eradicated by a Hague convention in 1907. And precisely because it op-
poses the state itself, civil war cannot be sanctioned internationally, and in-
terstate diplomacy must disinterestedly ignore its existence as a fact. The
territory itself may not take part in international practice: a state attacked
or threatened by a terrorist group cannot negotiate with it without risking
the negation of the very conventions on which its own legitimacy is
founded. Thus the sacrosanct principle of negotiation only from state to
state is put forth on all occasions, even as a cautious protection against the
slightest clandestine negotiation between a state and a terrorist group.
This reproduction of the nation-state model finds support in two para-
doxes that have become the most effective of all dependence practices: the
juridical fiction of sovereignty and the game of power. The first derives from
one of the best-established principles of contemporary international rela-
tions. The international system can be constituted only of sovereign states
whose juridical identity reflects that of the Western states, and this is at-
tested by membership in the United Nations. In the effort of universaliza-
tion, every international normative construction must affirm the sover-
eignty of each state and the concomitant right and duty to protect itself.

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 79

The first element of the paradox comes from the inability of these states,
such as they are constituted, to maintain more than a fictional sovereignty.
Possessing only the slimmest capacities, they lack the means internally to
meet the requirements of the Hobbesian pact. Fragmented social spaces,
deprived of a unique and structured civil society, divided by the powerful
communal solidarities of which they are composed, issue to the state only
the weakest requests for guarantees of security. Because they are weak
states up against strong societies, to use Joel Migdal’s idea, in reality they
represent a largely fictional identity configuration.*? Diametrically opposite
to this logic, the international system invests the most essential of its nor-
mative resources and its political practice in maintaining the juridical per-
sonality of each state. By challenging all territorial modifications, estab-
lishing the principle of noninterference and respect for state sovereignty as
the very foundation of diplomacy, and refusing to recognize as an inter-
locutor and partner in negotiations anyone but the legal governments of
states, the international system compensates for internal weaknesses with
the maintenance, and even the activation, of external capacities. Whether
it concerns Libya, Ethiopia, Chad, or Angola, the lack or absence of legiti-
macy in the political center, the fictitiousness or precariousness of its au-
thority, the nonexistence of the state’s real relations with the governed are
at each step compensated for by an influx of international legitimation
elicited solely by its identity as a state actor.”°

Understandably, this contradiction is sustained, particularly by non-
Western political systems that find an appreciable guarantee of their hold
on power in conformity to the state model. Deriving from a “warrior
state,” where competition for power involves a Khaldunian-type perma-
nent communal confrontation, Chad saw a substantial mutation in the dis-
course employed by its political personnel when they acceded to power.
The new discourse revealed a fastidious respect for international law, since
it provided a distinction from its former guerrilla practice. In the same
manner, Iraq’s leaders were able to criticize an “imperialist international
law” that condemned its invasion of Kuwait while simultaneously express-
ing a fastidious respect for an international law that allowed it to reestab-
lish its sovereignty during the Kurdish rebellion. Even the Movement of
Nonaligned Nations based its own positions on the principle of national
sovereignty while simultaneously condemning dependence practices and
detaching itself from them.

At the same time, the Northern powers encourage this paradox because
they readily benefit from it. Located exclusively in the context of the state

8o THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

as nation, the principle of sovereignty tends to maintain in the non-West-
ern world what Robert Jackson calls “quasi-Nations” or a “negative sover-
eignty.”*! As a result, it tends to worsen the effects of distance between the
center and the periphery within the international system, and it also wors-
ens the conditions that necessitate the exercise of genuine dependence re-
lations. It accelerates the decomposition of the internal functioning of pe-
ripheral societies, that is, the retribalization and activation of new modes
of communalization from which the religious sects, the social elite, and the
independent preachers benefit equally, while it affirms cultural minorities.
This composition reduces the sphere of authority of the country’s leaders,
thereby increasing their propensity to seek the status of client to the states
in the center. Perhaps even more serious, the fragmenting of civil society
vigorously transforms economic development into a source of confronta-
tion and competition so as to weaken even more the peripheral state and
reinforce its dependence. In fact, this contradiction is largely contained in
the entirely fictitious idea that the interstate system is an international sys-
tem, that is, that the divisions among sovereign elements correspond in ef-
fect to apportioning off units conscious of their national identity, so that
the relation between national sovereignty and state sovereignty occurs in a
transitive manner. Conversely, the intransitivity of these categories in the
context of non-Western societies leads to a view wherein the universality of
the state model is attached solely to the dynamic of international relations.
Moreover, the paradox is exacerbated by the largely fictitious nature of
the way the principle of sovereignty itself is transferred into the interna-
tional sphere. According to this principle, there can be no source of au-
thority outside the state, which is the ultimate holder of all means of con-
straint. In terms of international relations, only two alternative conditions
exist: either states function in a relation of strict equality of power, or they
produce normative and institutional conditions that allow the arbitration
of their disputes. The second possibility is tantamount to abandoning sov-
ereignty, which is contradictory, aside from the fact that sovereignty was
never in effect. The first seems perfectly utopian because, in fact, the states
remain unequal to each other, for it creates conditions of international
competition that noticeably reinforce the gap between the juridical affir-
mation of sovereignty and the means by which it can be realized concretely.
In this context, the principle of law becomes an ideal that the political
elites of developing societies use to criticize the actual political order. Ac-
tors in non-Western nationalism use the principle of the universality of sov-
ereign and equal nations in order to denounce inequality. The universalist

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 81

principle inscribed in the West’s history becomes a principle universalized
by the actions of anti-establishment strategies.

The paradox of the power game derives from the fact that, in a context of
weak institutionalization, the confrontation of powers becomes the sole
means of competition conceivable; however, by definition, this means can
involve only a small number of states. It falls to the others to define, in
practice, an alternative mode of political expression that, by contravening
the rules of the game, can be assimilated only through a deviation of some
sort and through the exacerbation of insecurity.

From this point of view, the cold war falls perfectly in the norm, for it
sanctioned a balance by terror and thus made the mutual neutralization of
powers a way to validate the principle of sovereignty. That the East-West
conflict became also a conflict of states and ideologies reinforced this veri-
fication, since in the final analysis it demonstrated that the confrontation
of ideological concepts could only disrupt the reciprocal respect of sover-
eignty. The discussion made sense then because, in a disciplined competi-
tion among states seeking the maximum of unilateral advantages, each
side could indicate how far it would go and at what point it considered its vi-
tal interests threatened. In short, behind this balance of power lay the im-
plicit affirmation of a principle of equality between states that gave mean-
ing to the hypothesis of sovereignty. Because each party was thus entirely
sovereign and took full part in the same state universalism, nothing that
was ultimately unacceptable for the other could take place.

The end of the cold war and the East-West conflict strongly shook this
model by divesting it of at least its universality. As abstract as it may be, the
hypothesis of a North-South conflict presents difficulties: a conflict of
power can bring into opposition the countries of the South, as was revealed
in the wars between Iran and Iraq, Algeria and Morocco, or India and Pak-
istan, but in no way can it pit a country of the South against a country of the
North. So this second type of conflict can alternatively or jointly take forms
that completely violate interstate logic: either by the massive recourse to
extrastate modes of action, such as terrorism, the mobilization of transna-
tional groups, the opposition of the state against its citizens; or by recourse
to forms of war that, instead of opposing one power against another, tend
to reproduce an international confrontation between dominator and dom-
inated, thus making the conflict into a “protest” war.

The process is all the more novel for being explicitly antistate and for
jeopardizing international practices: the state’s monopoly of the use of vi-

olence, the recognized and institutionalized priority of allegiance relations

82 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

for citizens over the network of transnational solidarity, and the use of force
by the state exclusively to protect or define its sovereign boundaries. How-
ever, conflicts in the South tend to superimpose the elements of this logic
and others that come from its opposite, as revealed by the instability and
war that have for decades characterized the Horn of Africa.** Before be-
coming an interstate confrontation, war belonged to a long tradition of
structured relations among ethnic groups, tribes, and clans, as indicated by
the longevity of conflictual relations between Tigreens and Amhara within
Ethiopia, but also among Ethiopians, Somalis, Afari, Issaaqi or Oromos,
and equally between Ethiopians and the Muslim nomads of Eritrea. All
these conflicts transcend for the most part the structures and allegiances of
the state. In the middle of the Ogaden conflict, the Tigreens formed pacts
with Italy in the war of conquest between Italy and Ethiopia in order to pre-
serve the right of access to their pastures. Addis Ababa took advantage of
the opposition between Muslim nobles and Christian serfs and exploited
clan rivalries to contain the Eritrean separatists. At the same time, how-
ever, all the conflicts fell into the interstate context. In its conflict with
Ethiopia, Somalia’s president Siyaad actively sought a Soviet alliance, and
confronted with particularly serious internal economic difficulties, Soma-
lia joined the Arab League in 1974 in order to benefit from Saudi Arabia’s
economic and financial support. Dropped by the USSR, which preferred
Ethiopia, Somalia had to solicit the protection of the United States,
whereas formerly the emperor had offered the United States the Eritrean
base at Gagnnaw with the purpose of obtaining its loyalty, even while he
sought rapprochement with the USSR, China, Nasser’s Egypt, and Saudi
Arabia. Cuba and certain Arab nations even sought mediation according to
the rules of international law.

Two superimposed levels come into play, though they do not have the
same status: sociologically, all the components of an action that break
down the interstate model to substitute other rules for it; institutionally,
crisis contexts that reactivate the state interaction mode, both internally,
where nations attempt to make use of communal antagonisms, and exter-
nally, where Southern nations seek—within the interplay of alliances and
protections or insertions into international institutions—the means to com-
pensate for their incapacities and their lack of legitimacy. Here as well is a
logic comparable to that by which the political elite seek in state-type
alignments a means to correct the weakness of their authority over their
governed. In foreign policies the paradox is even more marked, since the
excesses in state-like behavior indulged in by the leaders in the Southern

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 83

societies transcend the tensions and contradictions opposing institution-
alized international order to internal social dynamics.

Missing Civil Societies

The extreme diversity of these dynamics contrasts with the most decisive
implicit element of the entire machinery that tends to dominate the West-
ern model of political order, that is the postulate of universality that struc-
tures the concept of civil society. The historical construction of this con-
cept has often been discussed and is based on at least three distinctive
principles: the differentiation of private social spaces from the political
space; the individualization of social relations that thus confers precedence
on citizenship; and the presence of horizontal relations within society that
gives preference to associative logic over communal structures and that,
consequently, marginalizes particularist identification in favor of identifi-
cation with the state.

Each of these principles sustains universality and is easily integrated
into a general problematic of development that transcends each group’s
individual history. This problematic is explicitly associated with a norma-
tive and prescriptive approach intended to put the actors of non-Western
societies under obligation. The differentiation of the private and public is
considered the way to optimally reconcile general interests with private
ones, while favoring the realization of a specifically economic space, which
is a factor in development. Since the Enlightenment, and even more with
nineteenth-century evolutionism, the individualization of social relations
has been considered an emancipatory process that enhances rationality. It
progressively liberates the individual from communal allegiances, from
control by the group he belongs to naturally, and leads to a more free and
more critical socialization. Furthermore, it detaches the individual from a
natural will of the group in order to substitute a rational will, which opens
the door to calculation and evaluation. Horizontal solidarities, for their
part, complete the individual’s liberation from his particularist identifica-
tions to instill in him a sense of his role as a function of a social construct
that is not segmentary but rather organic, solidaristic, or functionally
competitive. According to this reading, all communitarianism can only be
residual, a legacy of tradition and bound to disappear as an entity as the
governability of political systems advances. Tribalism doubly negates the
principle of universality: first, by hampering the construction of a civil so-
ciety capable of transcending particularities, and second, by blocking the

84 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

advent of a universal modern society that would reproduce the same char-
acteristics everywhere and thus conform to a reasoning that could be noth-
ing other than unique.

The universalization of the model of civil society has three mechanisms
at its disposal. First, it is implied by the universality given to the state model:
it is the duty of the state’s founders to reduce the ways by which particular-
ist identities are formed, because these hinder the state’s claim of a monop-
oly over authority and limit extraction and mobilization capacities. Without
renouncing the value of his tribal identity, the prince seeks symbolically to
substitute for it his identity as father of the nation: without effacing his Sa-
helian particularity, President Bourguiba promoted his role as “supreme
combatant” and incarnator of the Tunisian nation; though he retained his
royal title, President Houphouét-Boigny preferred a paternal conception of
his relations with the people of Ivory Coast. More practically, the state ac-
tively constitutes a civil society by trying to endow itself with voluntary in-
terlocutors that supposedly incarnate different social interests and thus
transcend communal particularisms. The neocorporatist effort to construct
unions or interest groups closely tied to the state should not be analyzed
only as a symptom of authoritarianism, but also as an effort to more or less
artificially create social spaces structured as a function of various interests.

The constitution of a civil society also occurs through strategies em-
ployed by the intermediate elite: the progressive formation of new profes-
sional categories (lawyers or journalists, for example) promotes the rise of
associations. Such associations play a considerable role in India, but also
in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Ghana and Nigeria. The alignment of
these categories in terms of an associative conception derives from a cal-
culated strategy of universalization: in conformity, certainly, with a model
learned in the West, where these categories were developed, but judged
equally capable of protecting the specificity of their status and assuring, in
the most symbolic and manifest way, their new social position.

Finally and especially, the increase of transnational inflows constitutes
a powerful call, coming from the international system as a whole, for the
constitution of private associative networks. Professional associations are
themselves stimulated by the decrease in international nongovernmental
organizations to which, if one is isolated and threatened at home, one ad-
heres all the more willingly. The proliferation of humanitarian and human
rights associations amplifies this phenomenon in that, by promoting the
constitution of local branches, they accelerate the formation of embryonic
civil societies and thus guarantee if not the immunity, at least a not negli-

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 85

gible protection for a small local elite that for the most part comes from the
first nascent professional associative networks. The jurist Lahidji, who
took part in the creation, and then in the 1978 officialization of the Associ-
ation for Human Rights in Iran, told, for example, how this association was
begun by a dozen Iranian jurists and intellectuals in close contact with
Amnesty International and with the Association of Democratic Jurists, and
was integrated into the International Confederation of Human Rights.**
Mr. Lahidji also recalled how it was preceded by the constitution of the As-
sociation of Lawyers. Another promoter of the same cause, the writer Hajj
Seyyed Javadi, noted that it also helped the constitution of the Association
of Writers. What is true of this type of association holds equally true for
other professional, religious, or ideological associations and extends also
to the economic sphere. In short, the international dynamic reinforces
pressures—from minority and other individual sources—that support the
formation of a unified civil society. It thus encourages a “dual society”
composed, on one hand, of all these associative groups and, on the other,
of a communitarian order that cannot be considered a mere residual effect,
but rather is an integral part of the history of non-Western societies.

Thus the universality of the Western model not only declares its inten-
tions by its discourse, it also manifests an essential practice in the workings
of the international system. This system is organized around norms that are
unique, but also in place culturally, wherein it obeys models deriving from
Western history that weigh on each non-Western political order, as if by do-
ing so it rectifies its own developmental trajectory. The pressure, however,
does not stop at the forced universalization of interstate activities. It goes
well beyond that to exert pressure notably on economic, cultural, or asso-
ciative transnational inflows, thereby fostering the paradox of consolidat-
ing globally a culture of the state by means that are extrastate in nature.

In a manner perhaps still more determinantal, the tensions that give
rise to this universalist logic often profit from the interstate model and
even nourish it and support its completion. The mutually affirming in-
compatibilities between certain cultures and the territorial order help
change identificatory claims linked to dominated cultures into territorial
ones, thus accelerating their entry into state logic. Such was the case with
the Kurdish and Tamil issues. The universalization of international law be-
longing to Western history leads the non-Western leaders to use its princi-
ples in order to claim the rights those principles confer. Interethnic and
intertribal conflicts become interstate conflicts precisely because they ac-
tivate relations among the nations of the region, precipitate or consolidate

86 THE EXPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

alliances, and accelerate phenomena of clientelism by the Northern pow-
ers. The weakening of internal political abilities proper to the developing
political systems pushes the governing leaders to consolidate their status
by acquiring a symbolic ability that they derive from their insertion in the
international system. Finally, claiming the state principle of sovereignty
constitutes the last symbolic advantage the princes can employ to contain
the effects of dependence.

All of these dynamics are based on power relations, on a specific mode of
resource distribution, and on the use of violence. But they derive as well
from an original cultural configuration constituted throughout Western
history that reflects a specific articulation of the particular and the univer-
sal, and the affirmation of self as a particular identity different from that of
another, but all the same universalizable. The principle of the state as na-
tion definitely lies at the center of this duality, since it supports the claims
of each cultural identity to accede to sovereignty, but also the universality
of a mode of political administration that finds the mark of its virtue in
equalizing, normalizing, difference-effacing, and transcending particular
interests. Though often incomprehensible in other cultures, the idea of the
state nevertheless flatters and attracts because it evokes sovereignty and
emancipation. Though subject alternatively to loss of meaning and suscep-
tibility to misinterpretation, the state can nevertheless cultivate ambiguity
to its profit.

Yet the logic of exportation finds its limits in the logic of importation at
work within the importing societies. Western political models would have
only the slightest chances of becoming universalized if they did not find an
active reception outside their place of origin, where they were invented.
Aside from an infinite number of strategies used by individual actors who
benefit from carrying out these practices, the articulation of the processes of
importation and exportation emphasizes the diversity of cultural constructs
of the universal and, in fact, their irreconcilable nature. Where the Western
model is based on a functional and very productive combination of the uni-
versal and the particular, other cultures have affirmed different combina-
tions throughout their history, which explains many misunderstandings.

Since Hindu culture already views itself cosmogonically, it cannot be re-
duced to the same particular-universal distinction. The Hindu world al-
ready exists in a universal that contains within itself an infinity of particu-
lars, notably in terms of sects and castes. This construct makes it difficult
to assimilate the conception of other and self within Western categories.
Hence the great difficulty of defining a Hindu or Indian nation within the

THE UNIVERSALIST CLAIM OF THE STATE 87

international system. Hence, and more generally, the intensity of problems
resulting from the need to fit into a different world and through it to accept
and integrate its political models.

Islamic culture seems to present another variant. Since it is defined in
relation to a universal inscribed in a Revelation, it is accessible to the
other’s culture, but only in the name of either a proselytism through which
it exports more than it imports, or a temporary coexistence with another
world that it does not accept as a bearer of universality. Without trying to
be exhaustive, one could envision other examples, such as tribal cultures,
that of the Nuer studied by Evans-Pritchard or the Kachin observed by
Leach, which do not integrate the universal in their political construction
and conceive of their moves in this area only as the reproduction of a par-
ticularist identity.** Tribal culture, which neither proselytizes nor consid-
ers itself in terms of a universal, is not easily brought into the dialectic of
importation and exportation; this lack of affinity is perhaps one of the
foundations of its resistance to incorporation into a statist framework.

These cases of cultural resistance, however, cannot be seen as eternal.
They combine with the strategies of actors who find it useful to upset these
orientations in order to become importers and thus try to overcome the ob-
stacles that hamper exportation. Hesitation to universalize the Western
model is then more or less surmounted politically by a desire for importation.

PART TWO

The lmportation of
Political Models

Bcicitaiios arouses tensions, opens gaps, creates frustrations; but it
grows strong and expands. Power and hegemony do not explain everything.
Western political models spread and become globalized because—perhaps
principally because—they are imported. They are sought after and inte-
grated because they meet the strategic needs of the importing actors, and
thus result from individual choices guided by incentives and rewards,
hopes and expectations.

For this reason, the importation of Western models concerns both actors
and products, the great variety of which explains that this global process is
complex, and that it lends itself dangerously well to amalgamation. The des-
ignation of sites is just as delicate. Though the opposition between the ex-
porting North and the importing South supplies some answers, as an expla-
nation it lacks rigor. Westernization radiates through the world’s societies
from a center that includes Western Europe and North America, but the in-
sertion of Latin America becomes uncertain. Claiming its status as Western
while aligning more and more with the Indian populations that reject such
an insertion, Latin America is both part Western and an importer. This sit-
uation clearly differs from what happens in societies that, like Japan, India,
or the Arab world, have a different history from that of the West, a different
political tradition from what is now being universalized, and an entirely dif-
ferent culture from what makes up Western identity.

With this distinction we can see how importation works. Fundamen-
tally, it designates the transfer into a given society of a model or practice of
a political, economic, or social nature, that was invented and developed in
a historical context foreign to it and that derives from a fundamentally dif-
ferent social order. The dysfunctions that accompany this process tend nat-
urally to crystallize into acute cultural dissonance; but such acuteness itself
is not the founding element. Even if they claim to be Western, Latin Amer-
ican societies live on a daily basis the logic of being borrowers, the tension
between their history and that of the exporting societies, just as they un-
dergo the effects of the forced globalization of their development and the
methods used by the importing elite who govern them. These essentially
compose the dynamic of importation, its constraints and setbacks.

3. Importers and Their Strategies

The principal paradox of importation logic probably comes from the wide
variety of those initiating it. Widely criticized as a bearer of dysfunction
and failure, the process of westernization is an integral part of the most di-
verse and unexpected strategies. Though often conceived as a weapon of
those in power, the importation of Western models serves the purposes of
protest movements as much as it does those of conservative projects.
Though the target of most protest movements, it infiltrates their themes
and their daily political practices. Though an instrument of action and of
government, it is also widely supported by the intellectual elite, regardless
of the discipline in which they think and write and regardless of the orien-
tations of their convictions.

The Power Actors

The very workings of power place the actor in the position to borrow his
ways of being, thinking, and organizing from an external source. The diffi-
culty, however, comes from the complexity of an approach whose results
are not all consciously sought; and when they are sought, they bring a mix-
ture of desired actions and undesired restrictions. In fact, dependence de-
rives from a complex logic that is all the more effective because it places the
actor who submits to it in the position of supplicant, wherein he is fully
convinced that he receives advantages from his position as dependent. Fur-
ther, there are two types of dependent positions: either the dependence rel-

94 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

ative to the foreign country brings the leader new options, or it convinces
him that it can in the future help reinforce his own resources of power and
thus his chances of emancipation from the constraints of external control.

Importation and Conservation

Conservative modernization represents, at least in the beginning, a rea-
soned choice: to better preserve his power, the leader tries to adapt it to the
new conditions, that is, to an ideal of modernity that he hopes will bring
him both additional resources and increased legitimacy. The leader thus
tries to present modernity as a neutral and universal category, hence adapt-
able to any culture. It is thus endowed with a legitimacy superior to what
justifies all the particularisms. In this, the leader’s actions claim to be su-
perior to those of his opponents, who are consigned to the periphery as
representatives of a tradition easily categorized as inferior.

Aside from this option, several strategies are possible. The first was
clearly expressed by the Ottoman sultan in the nineteenth century. Fo-
cused essentially on external affairs, this strategy was an attempt to shore
up crumbling power by selectively borrowing Western recipes for success.
The second occurred in the very center of the Meiji revolution and tended
to borrow in an effort to satisfy internal needs first. The difference between
these two strategies is not clear-cut. It does, however, reveal the shape of
different projects whose chances for success are far from equal, as history
has already shown.

Variants of the Ottoman strategy appeared in Persia and Egypt, but also
later in Morocco, the Arabian Peninsula, and Siam. The Ottoman case is the
clearest: moments of heavy importation correspond closely to periods dur-
ing which military strength weakened relative to the West and sultanic
domination within the empire deteriorated. Thus the importation strategy
was essentially selective and began in the military. In addition, westerniza-
tion began under Selim III with the mission of General Sébastiani.*! Simi-
larly, it was revived after Mahmud II’s defeat in Syria, with the mission of
General von Moltke." Likewise, Mehemet-Ali began a long process of west-
ernization in Egypt, notably with the cooperation begun by Captain Séve.

*Translator’s Note: Bastien Sébastiani (1772-1851). Napoleon’s ambassador to
Constantinople in 1806, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, and minister of the navy
under Louis XVIII.

'Translator’s Note: Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891). A veteran of the Turkish
campaigns (1835-39), a disciple of Clausewitz, and the author of several works on
military strategy.

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES 95

Strictly military in the beginning, the logic of importation extended func-
tionally to the areas of administration and education. Military reforms be-
gun by Selim IIT condemned first of all the traditional military administra-
tion; in particular, in 1807 the janissary corps set in motion a plot that
culminated in the assassination of Mustafa IV. These reforms also chal-
lenged the local administrative apparatus, which was so decentralized that
it hindered both the mobilization of human resources and the fulfilling of
governmental functions. The logic of these reforms thus led directly from
the borrowing of Western military techniques to a vast administrative re-
form that practiced the Weberian principle of a state monopoly on power
and took over the political functions exercised locally by tribal, familial, and
religious structures. During this period, there formed the first coalition of
actors uneasy about westernization, in which janissaries found themselves
side by side with the local notables and the ulama. Significantly, von
Moltke’s mission relaunched administrative reform by promoting, in the
name of Western military rationality, the constitution of a civil service
composed of agents receiving fixed salaries. Similarly, the progressive for-
mation of a modern Ottoman army, which in 1742 numbered 400,000 men,
resulted in the creation of military academies and the progressive diffusion
of knowledge borrowed from positivism and scientism. This phenomenon
occurred in Egypt, where modernization of the army accompanied the first
administrative reforms and thus promoted the creation of ministries and
provincial administrative institutions that initially oversaw conscription
and later taxation. Simultaneously, Mehemet-Ali sent the first Egyptian stu-
dents to Europe for their education. The creation of military schools, such
as those of the infantry at Damietta, the artillery at Thourah, or the cavalry
at Giza, was echoed by the August 1834 opening of a School of Civil Engi-
neering. The latter supported the diffusion of Saint-Simonianism, where
Lambert served as director of the School of Mines inaugurated in 1838;
“school commissions” and “councils of public education” spread through-
out Egyptian villages, where Saint-Simonians associated with educated
Egyptians. In this context the first westernized elite was formed—around
Minister Tahtawi, Mazhar Effendi, and the first engineers, such as Reshvan
Effendi and Mustafa Effendi—and was influenced by Auguste Comte and
John Stuart Mill.

The same phenomenon occurred in the history of Persia, for its defeats
in the war against Afghanistan are what triggered the process of modern-
ization and, in fact, of westernization, which first affected the army, fol-
lowing the same logic experienced by its Ottoman neighbors. Yet this de-
velopment lacked the amplitude of the Ottoman experience because it did

96 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

not involve directly and quickly enough the Persian bureaucracy, which for
a long time remained trapped in neopatrimonial logic. This difference can
also be explained by strategic considerations. Though the Persian bureau-
cracy was smaller and older, it had for a long time focused on individual ad-
vancement, so that an individual of a socially modest background had a
chance to accede to the highest levels in society. Rather than organize a co-
herent pressure group that would militate for reforms from which it would
benefit collectively, the Persian bureaucracy supported individualized
strategies for social advancement or the retention of power, the latter hav-
ing more to do with maintaining the status quo than promoting western-
ization. Asa result, such efforts undertaken by Amir Kabir and Sepah Salar
met with hostility and intrigues from other agents, who dissuaded the mon-
archs from engaging in policies of change that could be divisive and weaken
support already in their favor.”

The very cohesive monarchical practice of westernization extended to
the military, educational, and administrative sectors; this extension was,
however, facilitated by intermediary strategies, some of which were chosen
freely and some of which were imposed by force, nineteenth-century Per-
sian monarchs, of course, being little inclined to support a conservative
modernization, which they feared would limit the reach of their despotism.
Naseredin Shah, for example, inaugurated the first polytechnical school in
Teheran, though he was apprehensive about an educated—and thus anti-
establishment—elite developing in his midst. Yet the essential aspects of this
problem probably existed at another level. Modernization occurred in suc-
cessive waves: diffusion of the Western model developed here and there,
solidly infiltrating the army, administration, and education. But the ab-
sence of intermediary support within the administration itself, that is, the
lack of expectation of a change from which he could benefit, almost negated
the prince’s efforts. The most successful aspects of westernization did have
this support, as in the Ottoman empire, or as we shall see later, in Meiji
Japan. On this point at least, certain developmentalist theses are partially
right. The acquisition of a collective rationality and hence an esprit de corps
unreservedly promoted the transformation of institutions, even if promot-
ing a Western politico-administrative order did not seem very functional.

This phenomenon has currently acquired an even more marked impor-
tance within traditional monarchic regimes. The administrative apparatus
and its agents went from merely supporting the processes of westernization
to becoming a clear motivating force. Morocco is a case in point. As the per-
fect site for the promotion of the Western model of the state, the adminis-

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES Q7

tration became far more than a simple support of the sharifian policy of
conservative modernization. Combining their expectations with those of
the urban middle classes, the civil servants were doubly motivated by their
Western university educations and the reduction in contacts with their Eu-
ropean counterparts. They acted cohesively to change the legitimacy the
prince possessed from the traditional formula to a “rational-legal” concept
in alignment with the Western model of the state. After a point, too strong
an administrative support of importation disrupts conservative modern-
ization, since it dangerously compromises traditional legitimacy.’*

An essential aspect of the conservative modernization process lies pre-
cisely in the leader’s efforts to simultaneously import Western models and
preserve his own hold on traditional authority. The sultan Abdul Hamid IT
was remarkable in this respect, since he integrated a selective introduction
of Western practices and institutions with a reactivation of the caliphate. In
this way the sultan supported the return, not of the orthodox Islam he feared
would limit his power, but of a mystical Islam that he counted on to help le-
gitimate political and social transformation. The official support brought to
the Arab Sufi sects, particularly the Rifai Alep order, is revealing because the
dignitaries looked favorably upon Alep, particularly his master Abdul Khoda
al-Sayyadi, who specifically wished the reestablishment of the caliphate to
take precedence over the establishment of a constitutional order.*

Beyond the Islamic world, the nineteenth-century monarchs of Siam
brought about the same process of modernization. Rama I, founder of the
Chakki dynasty, sought to reintroduce the rites and principles of classical
Buddhism into his country and his court; he thus initiated a long process of
reform continued by his successors based on a consolidation of traditional
royal legitimacy. Siam opened progressively to Western influence, which be-
came more marked as the monarchy transformed and consolidated, and
thus retained power in spite of the colonial powers then occupying Asia. The
reigns of Mongkut (1851-1868) and Chulalongkorn (1868-1910) resemble
what has been observed in the Ottoman empire, since both these monarchs
undertook a selective westernization, especially in the military, administra-
tive, and legislative areas, even while they were supported by the restoration
of traditional legitimacy. Here, however, the process reinforced monarchi-
cal power, whereas the sultan’s power in Siam continued to weaken. This
weakening allowed the Siamese royalty to impose a gradual westernization
on the conservative aristocracy without having to seek the support of other
elite groups. At the same time, westernization meant a modulation, even a
transformation, of the system of meaning: unlike the monarch of Burma,

98 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

the Siamese monarch gradually played down the references to various iden-
tities supplied by Buddhism, such as Boddhisattva, Chakravartin (world
governor), Devaraja (king-god), and Dharmaraja (just king); this led to a
progressive secularization of the person of the king that allowed him to ful-
fill an increasingly active role in political life and social change. This transi-
tion to mortal status strengthened the new elite, who both supported the
new policies and functioned as importers of Western models.°

For their part, the Burmese monarchs chose to concede nothing in the
definition of their attributes or the cultural foundations of their power, and
to close themselves to Western influence, with the possible exception of
King Mindon Min (1853-1878). Thus the principal effect of British con-
quest was to topple Buddhism’s role as cultural referent and standard-
bearer in the process of protest mobilization and, also, as the ideology of
the governing center. In any case, the difference between Siam and Burma
reveals two peripheral political systems that developed in response to the
West: a penetration of Western influence undertaken by the leader him-
self, in the case of Siam; and a closing off to the West, which resulted in a
loss of independence and subsequent colonization, in the case of Burma. It
is probable that no direct or exclusive relation exists between these strate-
gies and their results, but there can be no doubt that some relation does ex-
ist: by aligning with the Western model, Siam reassured the West and at the
same time strengthened its resources; by closing itself off, Burma probably
hastened both colonial invasion and the dismantling of its political struc-
tures by the British administration. The conservative modernization un-
dertaken by Siam corresponded to strategic considerations of adaptation to
the international political order and an effort to protect the royal power
structure against destabilization.°

The Meiji revolution reflects the logic of conservative modernization as
well, but it derives from a very different strategy, one that assigned a dif-
ferent meaning to the importation of Western models. The trajectory of
Japan’s development has always been characterized by a strictly limited and
controlled opening to the outside. Penetration by the Jesuits in the six-
teenth century resulted in around 500,000 conversions to Catholicism,
which precipitated the decision to expel the missionaries; in the eighteenth
century the Dutch presence was tolerated only because it spread the ideol-
ogy of the Reformation and helped balance the importation of Catholic
values; it also favored the circulation of scientific and utilitarian ideas.
However, the Meiji era cannot be analyzed as the end point of this earlier
westernization, which was too weak and too controlled to topple the then-

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES 99

current political order; nor did it depend, as in the Ottoman empire or in
Siam, on a tactical adaptation to an international order that had become
confining. Westernization did, however, help restore the imperial power
to a position central to and above the shogunate and the feudal order. It is
significant that the process occurred by the mobilization of Western influ-
ence, by solutions very close to state logic, and by the initiative of tradi-
tional elite groups—all without provoking the protest and rejection con-
spicuous in Muslim societies.’

Mobilization of Western influence appears clearly in a sociological anal-
ysis of the Meiji elite, all of noble families, but marked too by the diversity
and density of their knowledge of the West. Three years after the restora-
tion of the imperial order, a large, governmental-level Japanese delegation
spent two years in Europe and the United States. The 1889 constitution
owes much to the Prussian model, notably in its definition of imperial pri-
macy, and the new government tried to abolish feudal rights.®

The solutions adopted closely resemble the construction of the Western
state. This was the case with military reform, which immediately built a na-
tional army placed directly under imperial authority, toppled the interme-
diate powers, and established a state monopoly on legal physical violence.
This was also the case with the administrative reforms that converted the
daimyo into provincial governors and the samurai into agents of the impe-
rial bureaucracy. Finally, it was also the case with the tax reforms, which
led in 1873 to a new property tax. Constructed thus on the mobilization of
military, administrative, and fiscal resources, the new imperial system
turned to its own profit the dynamic of centralization that came initially
from the Western institution of the state.

This modernization process is all the more conservative because it relies
on support from the traditional elite, in contrast, for example, to the Bis-
marckian revolution, which came about more through political actors than
from demands on the part of the elite. Unlike the Japanese aristocracy, the
Junkers actively opposed change. The solid conservative base that bene-
fited the Meiji revolution can probably be explained by the absence of a
democratic potential in the revolutionary process. Cut off from any popu-
lar support and from any reference to democracy, the selective importation
of the Western model would be less likely to provoke mistrust on the part of
the elite in power. Elsewhere, since the samurai had been dispossessed by
the shogunate, they had little reason to invest in a rural and feudal social
order; instead, they expected reform to supply them with new social roles
in the context of an urbanized society. For this reason, the Meiji revolution

TOO THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

could mobilize support from the entire traditional elite, which pressed for
conversion to a meritocracy in the domain of employment and that saw a
chance for adaptation in the importation of Western models. Here para-
doxically, the new imperial order was built on a minimal consensus, as was
the case earlier for the construction of the state in postfeudal Europe; on
the other hand, selective imitation of the Western model aroused no hos-
tility in the groups that might be victimized by it. Westernization came
about more solidly in Japan than in the Muslim world because,it was more
a function of internal considerations, with no direct or pressing influence
from without, in a more controlled manner, and without directly contra-
vening any of the benefits gained.’

In fact, in most all of these cases, westernization offered a way to fill
“empty spaces” or ambiguous ones. Faced with the decomposition of a feu-
dal order that no longer permitted the shogunate to control certain areas of
Japanese territory, particularly in the southwest, the Meiji revolution ap-
pealed to the logic of a monopoly on power. The Ottoman sultan tried to en-
act the same process in order to counter the increasing autonomization of
the ‘zyan that derailed every real process of mobilization or systematic con-
trol of territory. The Persian shah tended to react to the growing power of
the governors, who dealt directly, and thus over his head, with foreign pow-
ers. In fact, in each of these cases, the principle of territoriality was per-
ceived as the most valuable and essential element among all the borrowings
the leaders sought to absorb from the West. Territorial logic fulfilled a dou-
ble function: it favored insertion into the international order by aligning
structures in place with those of the dominant powers; and it replaced a seg-
mented imperial order by a closed, centralized state that may have dimin-
ished the prince’s symbolic influence, but noticeably reinforced his capacity
for decisive action. This action was a calculated risk. It turned out to be ef-
fective and lucrative for postmedieval Europe, since it had been effected
through the initiative of dynastic centers that were growing in power at the
expense of their disintegrating peripheries. For similar reasons, it had a pos-
itive effect in Meiji Japan, where the relation between center and periphery
benefited the prince even more because the traditional elite had already
been deprived of their resources by the shogunate and were pleading for
reintegration into the center. On the other hand, the calculated risk was dan-
gerous in certain conservative monarchies of the Muslim world: in the Ot-
toman empire and in Persia, more than in Egypt or Morocco, peripheral re-
sistance and stirrings on the part of the notables became particularly acute,
and thus worked against the construction of a state on the Western model.

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES IO!

The creation of a new political system follows a similar logic, for it also
requires the formation, even the invention, of a territory, the diminution
of peripheral authorities, and especially the creation practically ex nihilo
of an entire network of institutions. The example of the Middle Eastern
monarchies presents a process of conservative action, since a traditional
dynastic center was in control. This construction of new states involved the
double concern to protect the formula of legitimacy on which the authority
of the prince rested and to endow the political scene with the institutions
necessary for its functioning as quickly as possible. The need for quick,
short-term action became a decisive factor in the more general borrowing
from the Western model. In this respect, it is remarkable that the Iraqi
monarchy, at its inception, wrote a constitution inspired by the Australian
model, whereas the successive constitutions of the Hashemite kingdom of
Jordan reflected Western constitutionalism and that the first was of Indian
origin."® Perhaps even more significant, Kuwait reveals the complexity of a
double reference, both traditional and Western. In the 1930s the al-Sabah
emirs took up policies that went far beyond the simple tactical will to con-
solidate their own power. This phenomenon grew stronger with indepen-
dence, acquired in 1961. Needing to assure its survival as much against
Nasser’s pan-Arab movement as through its connection to the traditional
Wahabite monarchy, the emir Abdallah al-Salem al-Sabah sought a distinct
character for his state by acquiring, under British influence, a strongly
westernized constitution, dominated by the parliamentary model and by
the practice of the welfare state." Paradoxically, the will to distinguish it-
self initiated the act of importation: needing to act quickly, in the context
of a state to construct, but also seeking to protect his own authority from
competing models, the prince found in westernization a strategic means to
preserve his own power as well as his own specificity in relation to his im-
mediate neighbors. No paradox is lacking in the fact that the protection of
identity, or at least of independence relative to an influx of threats, could be
achieved by seeking Western influence. This influence has, of course, been
limited and, all told, remains precarious, since the parliamentary experi-
ence accompanying it has frequently been interrupted.

Importation and Revolutions

The importation of Western models appears also in the modernization
processes that invoke revolutionary legitimacy, beginning notably with a
more or less selective use of socialist themes. These themes provide the ad-

IO2 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

vantage of being able to indict the West and to thereby sustain an anti-
imperialist discourse that can explain failures in economic development.
However, these socialist and revolutionary references remain essentially
Western, as much in the authors who inspire them as in the conceptual sys-
tem mobilized, and especially in the justification the state derives from it.
Even still, one must be prudent here too and know how to tell the differ-
ence. Socialism provides both an effective basis on which to organize the
state’s center and symbolic compensation for the state’s ineffectiveness.

The first case corresponds clearly enough to the evolution undergone by
the leading elite in India, and more particularly by the Congress Party. As
the principal actor in Indian nationalism and the gaining of independence,
the party of India’s founding fathers had been from its inception profoundly
marked by Western influence. Founded in Bombay in 1835 at the insigation
of a retired Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume, it initially developed a na-
tionalist, state-centered, and secular ideology, clearly secondary to Indian
culture. Its conversion to socialism was actually concomitant with its ac-
cession to power. Essentially attributable to Jawaharlal Nehru, this conver-
sion gave the party a way to adapt to the requirements of state construction.
The Congress Party was not monolithic. The circumstances in which this
direction came to prevail remain very significant, not so much because of
the ideological investment in them as because of the deliberate strategies
toward a certain number of clearly voiced goals that they evoked.”

The first is the creation of a strong state for the precise purpose of over-
coming the traditional political order, which was segmented both locally
and socially. Providentially, socialism provided the governing elite with a
way to counterbalance the centrifugal effects of the traditional conception
of politics in India. We know that, contrary to the Chinese model, this con-
ception was basically characterized not only by the breakdown of the caste
system but also by a “galactic” conception of politics that traditionally
tended to give over a large portion of sovereignty to different territorial
units (villages, kingdoms, etc.), which made the Indian world a more or less
interconnected assemblage of dispersed entities. For the people attempt-
ing to develop a state that reflected the principles of the Congress Party,
promoting a unifying and legitimizing conception of a strong and powerful
state was an effective way to establish their monopoly on legitimate physi-
cal violence, which under cover of socialism, became the central objective
of their importation strategies.

Accordingly, the socialist reference promoted egalitarian principles that,
in the context of India’s construction of a state, became a major asset for the

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES 103

governing political elite. The diminution of inequalities in a society of castes
and profound regional disparities had the principal advantage of diminish-
ing the resources of the competing traditional elite and of thus establishing
the political arena as the privileged space for the exercise of power.

Finally, socialist ideology offered the new elites of the state, under the
cover of a guided and voluntary project of economic development for the
society at large, the means to establish influence in society and to increase
public property. With precisely this perspective, Nehru set up the Planning
Commission in 1950 and launched the first five-year plan the following year.
Later, the Industries Act allowed no new industrial enterprise or any signif-
icant extension of existing factories to function without state licensing. In
1952 Nehru set up the National Development Council, made up of the prin-
cipal ministers, which offered supplementary conditions of intervention in
economic life. Nor was the agricultural sector forgotten, for it was the pri-
mary focus of the first plan, which initiated an important agrarian reform,
followed by an attempt to establish cooperatives under direct state control.
This important reform, presented at Nagpur in 1959 before the Congress
Party, was intended to initiate a genuine socialization of agriculture.

It is significant that the agrarian projects met with a lot more resistance
than the industrial ones, which for the most part were successful. In the
first case, the peasantry was profoundly marked by traditional culture and
refused to accept the socioeconomic order authorities wanted to graft onto
it. Nehru’s decision to back offin this area was a prudent one. In the second
case, socialization of large industry met with active support of a whole new
bureaucratic elite, who found in reform a means to guarantee its own posi-
tion and to reinforce its own power. To these ends, the 1955 Avadi resolution
formulated by Nehru was approved. It called for incorporating production
into the public sector; and the following year, the operating principle was
that fundamental industries had no choice but to belong to the public sec-
tor. It is revealing that as Indira Gandhi gained power she progressively al-
lied herself with these same options. In 1966, however, with her appoint-
ment as prime minister, she seemed to take the opposite position by
seeking a certain liberalization of the economy. Very quickly, she national-
ized numerous banks and insurance and mining companies. This socializa-
tion developed parallel to a gradual personalization and centralization of
power that the daughter of Pandit Nehru sought to develop to her advan-
tage. She kept her own portfolio as minister of the interior, strengthened
the police and other security forces, and reinforced the public administra-
tion and its direct control. Similarly, though Rajiv Gandhi tried to initiate

IO4 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

liberalizing policies, these were offset by the maintenance of an imposing
bureaucratic structure and by the progression of his own corrupt activities.
The liberal breakthroughs of Narasimha Rao became very fragile by 1991, in
part precisely because of resistance by the bureaucratic middle class, which
felt threatened and thus resisted them.

A similar logic can be seen in the context of the most radical political
systems that have recently achieved independence. Zimbabwe, for exam-
ple, evidences the unexpected effects of resistance to dependence and the
strange combination of importation practices Zimbabweans were sub-
jected to and those they provoked themselves. The Lancaster House ac-
cords concluded between Britain and the Zimbabwe African National
Union, a Marxist-Leninist inspired resistance movement led by Robert Mu-
gabe, sought to translate into institutional terms the compromise effected
between the black nationalists and the white minority, which held eco-
nomic power. This already precarious balance was conceived uniquely in
parliamentary terms, since it allowed a minimal number of parliamentary
seats to whites and guaranteed this disposition by defining a complex and
restrictive procedure of constitutional revision. More concretely, these ac-
cords established a compromise that conceded economic power to whites
and accepted for the blacks a political power overseen by the whites.”

This curious duality brought the economic sphere into opposition with
the political sphere. The first was successful and closely linked to South
Africa, across which 70 percent of Zimbabwe’s external commerce had to
be transported; the second was composed of constitutional institutions
taken whole cloth from British models, and was directed by a Marxist elite
educated in Christian schools but with no means of imposing its choices.
These two spheres contrasted with each other in terms of different capaci-
ties. The hegemony exercised by white economic power was evident in its
capacity to maintain free enterprise, to engage in close relations with
South Africa, to control development in poor rural zones occupied by the
black population, and also to diffuse among this population certain models
of collective organization. Thus the CACU, which coordinates agricultural
service cooperatives that supply black farmers, was modeled on the coop-
eratives of the white farmers dating from the colonial period. Also, the
NFAZ (National Farmer Association of Zimbabwe) brought black farmers
together in imitation of the former British master farmers’ clubs.

For its part, the political arena failed to attain a position of dominance.
Nota single element of ZANU’s socioeconomic program was ever really put
into practice. The agrarian reform project remained bogged down for along

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES IO5

time; planned nationalizations never occurred, and the effort to transform
abandoned “white farms” into state farms resulted in only a small number
of conversions. Significantly, attempts on the part of the Zimbabwean
“state” to penetrate social spheres controlled by the black population failed
completely. The creation of a minister of cooperatives never allowed for
leadership in these social spheres, since village social life was structured
more around community than around the state representative or the ZANU.
In response to its failings, the central power could manage no more than
symbolic gestures. For lack of ability genuinely to affect dependence struc-
tures, and in particular the capitalist models and institutions for develop-
ment, Robert Mugabe opted for a strong ideological investment, for which
he turned very broadly to Marxist discourse and symbolism. These were par-
ticularly effective among intellectuals and students, for whom socialism
provided compensation for the strength of white power in economic life.
This inspiration resulted, in December 1957, in the shaky political party that
henceforth paradoxically coexisted with a private, ultraliberal economic
sector that basically controlled industrial and agricultural production.
Similarly, Mugabe sought to address the genuine problems confronting
Zimbabwe (ethnic tensions, social and economic difficulties felt by rural
blacks owning small properties, and especially the inability of the central
power to penetrate the periphery) by manipulating political structures al-
ready in place. Failing to construct a state model possessing political com-
petence and adapted to endogenous cultural givens, the Zimbabwean pres-
ident tried to control the crisis by enacting constitutional reforms over
which he had influence, but which involved the population very little.

Alignment Constraints and Composition Effects

For all its success, westernization has not resulted from free choice exclu-
sively. It has also and especially come about in response—almost forced—to
alignment constraints in relation to Western powers. Whether a matter of
carrying out the wishes of these Western powers or bending to injunctions
expressed in diplomatic and military terms, constraint plays a major role in
importation, particularly in financial and politico-juridical areas.

The threat posed by nineteenth-century Russia weighed continually on
reform initiatives pursued by the Ottoman sultan. The first constitution of
the Ottoman empire, the Khatt-e-Sharif, was written in 1839 by Abdel Mad-
jid I and Rashid Pasha in order to obtain an alliance with Western powers.
All of its dispositions characteristically reflected moves toward the Western

106 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

model of the state: the introduction of security provision, of the right to
own property (regardless of the subject’s religion or nationality), of taxa-
tion. This charter also provided for elections and stipulated that the death
penalty could be applied only by a tribunal. Similarly, the war with Russia
(1853-55) supported approval of a second charter, in February of 1856 (the
Katt-e Homayyun), which spelled out certain important points: fiscal re-
form, budget annuities, the rights of Christians. In 1861, the recognition by
Abdel Aziz of the empire’s debts led him, in order to benefit from support
by the great powers, to accept the creation of a stock market and a state
bank modeled after those of France. During another disastrous financial
crisis, in 1875, Midhat Pasha deposed the sultan and strove to develop a
constitutional reform based on the Belgian system, specifically outlining
budgetary institutions in order to resemble more the Western model.

The same process occurred in Egypt. The 1876 economic crisis pro-
voked a call for help from the European powers, who required the partici-
pation of both English and French ministers in governmental decisions as
well as a redefinition of fiscal law, which notably required the prince to
submit yearly tax collections set by parliament. Similarly, each military
weakening of Persia, vis-a-vis England or Russia, resulted, beyond the ac-
ceptance of military missions from Europe, in concessions to Western pow-
ers who agreed to forgive debts. Particularly, the protest movements that
developed in the beginning of the century led to a progressively more ac-
tive “mediation” on the part of Britain, who pressed the shah into accept-
ing a constitution very similar to the Belgian one and, in addition, provided
for the election of an assembly.

This process was remarkably timely, and it was so for one of two reasons.
It could be that the leaders occasionally undertook the same steps in their
external policies. For example, Anwar Sadat sought to attract attention in
the West by establishing in 1974 a multiparty system that, albeit limited and
under surveillance, could at least nourish the fiction of a Western-style par-
liamentary life. Or perhaps, on the contrary, the Western powers placed
explicit conditions on their aid—in particular, they required a process of de-
mocratization that they saw purely and simply as the westernization of in-
stitutions and constitutional practices. This approach was particularly
strong with President Carter and was renewed at the Baule summit at the
initiative of Francois Mitterrand, which led certain African countries to
convoke national conferences, to set up multiparty systems, and to hold
competitive elections.

The importation of Western political models results not only from

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES 107

choice, forced or not, nor does it always have to do with a more or less
forced decision by the actors. It just as often results from a mixture of
choice and of social and political processes that no actor controls directly
and whose realization is all the more irreversible. Such results have oc-
curred frequently and in other countries as well, particularly in the Middle
East and Japan.

Several factors have produced westernization in the Middle East. The
primary factor lies in the secularization dominating nineteenth-century
Ottoman history, attributable to actions on the part of the sultan, even
though he did not always want secularization, which he did not find con-
gruent with his own project of conservative modernization. The sultan
wanted his brand of modernization as a means to protect monarchical
power and assure his authority. It was based on maintaining a traditional
authority that gave the sultan the powers of the caliph, thus sheltering him
from internal rivalries, and allowed him to control sociopolitical changes
more fully. Nevertheless, the construction of a state logic based on recen-
tralization around a renewed administrative apparatus, and the monopoly
of power by the sultanic center against peripheral authorities, put Mah-
mud II in the position of having to limit the functions of the sheykh-al-
islam, who in effect, incarnated the presence of a religious personnel at the
hub of the empire. The same motives led him to progressively diminish,
then, by instituting the Waqf, to dismiss the religious commissioners from
their positions in the army and to establish tight financial control of pos-
sessions held by the wlama. Here three essential elements of Western state
logic are implicated: the construction of a political center claiming domi-
nance for itself, absolute control of the military and thus of violence by the
politico-administrative power, and the public overseeing of all revenue col-
lection from the empire’s subjects. The sultans tried to compensate for this
loss of authority by a symbolic gesture, which led Abdul Hamid, notably, to
claim full restoration of caliphal authority for himself. It was impossible,
however, for them to reconcile the logic of monopolizing legitimate vio-
lence, within the very heart of the political system, with the maintenance
of religious roles based on a centrality built on other principles. Undesired,
secularization weakened the prince’s symbolic positions, which he had to
accept, nevertheless, as the direct effect of a conscious choice for the state
option. This choice was dramatic because it provoked a conflict that could
set in motion a counterlegitimacy and thus deprive all the conservative
monarchies of any other than exogenous formulas. This phenomenon ap-
peared progressively in nineteenth-century Persia during the Qadjar dy-

108 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

nasty, and more brutally with the Pahlavi. It also came about in Jordan, Mo-
rocco, and the Arab peninsula, and forced the princes to seek protection in
institutional immobility.

The effects of national communalization and territorialization are just
as formidable. The Ottoman empire’s progressive entry into the interna-
tional system already brought about a territorial logic that was in no way re-
ducible to the plurality of coexisting cultural minorities. The more delicate
outcome derives precisely from this uncontrollable transformation of the
very idea of minority. Traditionally, it did not amount to a national identity.
The valorization of an Arab consanguinity by one Butros al-Bustani implied
no demand to leave the Ottoman empire, no more than did the presence of
a thousand-year-old tribalism among the Kurds. Minorities found their
identity both in the expression of a cultural symbolism and in the claim of
autonomy, which is actually one of the principal prerogatives of the impe-
rial order. Yet historians have recently shown that the gradual progression
toward a national focus and then a nationalist one owes very little to the di-
rect spread of the Western idea of nation; rather it owes considerably more
to a complex mixture of diverse political changes.’ The well-known chan-
nels of entry for a nationalist ideology were in reality very fragile. Christian
schools contributed to this in Syria, but they affected just a small fraction
of the elite, and even this was undermined by the fact that the Christian mi-
nority had strategically chosen Ottoman ambiguity over an Arab national-
ism that could potentially entrench them even deeper into the status of mi-
nority. There were militant secret societies, influenced by Western ideas,
that supported the Arab nation, such as the Society of Young Arabs located
in Paris. But they came about late in the game and counted only a few indi-
viduals in their ranks. Whatever their importance intellectually, they held
little sociopolitical relevance.

Similarly, the classic thesis that sees the middle classes as vectors of na-
tional propaganda was gradually questioned. To see a heart and will in a
vaguely defined collective subject is an excess that sociologists have often
justly rejected. Moreover, historical analysis shows that the principal pro-
moters and pioneers of Arab nationalism were recruited from the ranks of
the traditional elite, notably Syrians from the Sunni milieu in Damascus,
that is, from the same social context in which the most loyal agents of the
Ottoman empire were found. Thus in fact, nationalism initially seemed
triggered by competition with the fast-developing political and adminis-
trative bureaucracy, whose recruitment possibilities were inevitably lim-
ited. Individually, it reflects an exit strategy deployed by an autochthonous

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES 10g

elite, disappointed at not benefiting from changes in the imperial order
and the effects of a westernizing bureaucracy. Formerly, the struggle for
status required one to obtain a religious position or to align with tribal
power; but later the construction of “modern” political and administrative
institutions became the primary site of competition. Henceforth, the birth
of a closed and selective public space took priority over the formation of
identifications and left those excluded from that space to define their own
identification by claiming another public space possessing a superior legit-
imacy. As an element in a cultural discourse, the concept “Arab” became
the tactical element in political practice and an argument for rejecting the
practice of delimiting a sovereign space. Arab nationalism is principally an
effect of the importation into the Muslim world of the Western idea of pub-
lic space. Introducing a new grammatical element paves the way for more
new elements to enter the discourse.

This does not mean that Arab nationalism is imputable exclusively to
competition among the elite groups, but this process accounts for a signif-
icant portion of its genesis and its early evolution. It bears the mark of the
ambiguities attending its birth, particularly in that it approaches the
masses through the large-scale nationalist ideologies that have punctuated
the history of the Arab world over the last four decades. It was supported by
the poorly controlled increase in social mobility and especially urbaniza-
tion, and thus reflects social instability; but that alone does not make it part
of a system of significations genuinely integrated by the masses. For exam-
ple, it rapidly developed into an adherence to a charismatic individual,
Nasser being the most famous; it was frequently confused with religious
principles; and the mobilizations it provoked were extremely precarious.

Moreover, the rise of a Western-type bureaucracy did not alone engen-
der nationalist behavior. Mobilization by the center also produced similar
effects, notably on tribal and community structures. For example, Sultan
Abdul Hamid himself enlisted various tribes in an army commanded by the
imperial center and thus considerably accelerated the formation of nation-
alist sentiments in the peripheral areas of his empire. The Hamidiyya was
created in 1891, made up essentially of Kurds. By mobilizing tribal groups,
by bringing the members closer together, by reducing transfers and placing
the men under the command of personnel not of their own extraction, the
Hamidiyya transformed Kurdish identity from a feeling of belonging to a
community-based and segmentary entity into a sense of belonging to a vast
entity with a specific character within the empire. Once again, one element
of state logic, this time the mobilization by the center of military resources,

ZILO THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

led directly to the awakening of a nationalism that played, in turn, an im-
portant role in reinforcing a competing Armenian nationalism.”

Clearly, colonial practices contributed decisively to expressions of na-
tionalist behavior. There too, however, the construction of a governmental
center was much more important than the identity of even its leaders. In
Egypt as in Iraq, the British presence was denounced as such by a small na-
tionalist elite, supported in Egypt by rural notables who had formerly sup-
ported Urabi Pasha. * For the others, the essentially provincial uprisings in
March of rgrg proclaimed the right to maintain traditional autonomy from
the powers in Cairo, regardless of the leader in place. Similarly, the Octo-
ber 1920 revolts that shook Iraq were initially tribal, more peripheral than
central, and more anti-taxation than directly anti-Western. Since these re-
volts were traditional in nature, they only gradually became part of nation-
alist activities, which many saw as due in part to European interests that
classified them as nationalist. Though they were initially antipolitical, by
virtue of their confrontation with Western-crafted governmental struc-
tures, they became the point of departure for the mobilization of the Egypt-
ian or Iraqi people in support of the nation.”

Ultimately, the construction of a nationalist logic brought up the prob-
lem of territorialization. Now territorialization grew out of a direct con-
straint imposed from without, notably the Treaty of Sevres.’ But it devel-
oped just as much from a conversion of the identification modes found in
diverse collectivities into a national sentiment that produced confused ter-
ritorial claims. British diplomacy tried to turn this conversion to its own
profit by promoting the creation of a Kurdish state, which would offer the
double advantage of a weakened Ottoman empire and the acquisition of a
client state. But this and other operations failed because of the two obsta-
cles that show just how much the territorial principle comes from an un-
clear exportation: the impossibility of defining a Kurdish geographical
space—particularly in the Armenian presence—and the mistrust of tribal
chiefs only too aware of what they stood to lose by a strong Kurdish national
community. In each of these cases, the elements of a communitarian cul-
ture work to relativize and nullify the rise of any national sentiment echo-
ing Western grammar. The superimposition of these two logics is, more-
over, easily explained as the competition between Kurdish movements and

*Translator’s Note: Urabi Pasha, a leader of the Nationalist Movement, who led
an insurrection against the British in 1882.

'Translator’s Note: Treaty of Sévres (August 10, 1920). The treaty between the Al-
lies and Turkey that officially dissolved the Ottoman empire.

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES Itt

their leaders, between Sharif Pasha, working alone and residing in Paris,
imbued with Western culture, militating for a Kurdish nation-state, and
multiple local tribal chiefs working to activate communitarian tribal alle-
giances. In fact, the case of Kurdistan is not unique. The imbrication of ter-
ritorial and communitarian logics, the ambiguous combination of nation-
alist and communitarian behaviors, each of which is sustained by various
political practices, are all found in Lebanon, Armenia, and Turkey; in other
words, in each case there arises the problem of different minorities in close
juxtaposition.

In the westernization of Japan, the same forces were at work. Beginning
in the sixteenth century, the shogunate’s active political scene required the
daimyo to reside in Edo (Tokyo) and the samurai to leave their rural resi-
dences, in order to limit the autonomy of both groups. This hierarchical re-
striction of feudal logic had several effects. It limited the political useful-
ness of land; it soon caused a shift toward the city, pauperized the samurai
class, and precipitated their frustration politically and financially, since
they lost their employment. It thus placed certain groups in the position of
asking to be integrated into the political arena. The participation of samu-
rai and certain daimyo in the Meiji revolution can be explained not only by
the dissolution of their bonds with the shogunate but also by their efforts to
reconstitute their positions of power within a modern state. In addition,
the samurai’s loss of basic resources led to their involvement in the con-
struction of an industrial economy, which helps explain both the rapid
progress of Japanese capitalism, particularly its immediate acceptance by
the elite, and the rather massive diffusion of those elements on which
Western industrial culture is based. If we compare Prussia’s conservative
modernization with that of Japan, which have long been considered simi-
lar, we can see the specificity of comportment proper to the traditional elite
who are both solicited and dispossessed, and thus led to invest themselves
in innovation and, in fact, to seize whatever advantages they can find in the
recomposition of an imperial state subject to westernization. This only
seems paradoxical, for the traditional identity of the elite in Japan sup-
ported their active alignment with the Western model.

Two other elements enter the picture. The absence of mass movements,
either by peasants or, more significantly, workers, made the importation of
Western models all the more selective. Chances to democratize were small,
since democracy had no potential importing agent within Meiji society. In
addition, Japan’s long-standing tradition of isolation, which for centuries
had stifled and limited every effort of the West to influence or control the

II2 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

country, allowed for a clear distinction between importation and subjuga-
tion; it also reconciled the fostering of fastidious nationalism combined
with imitation without risk of institutions imported from Europe. Thus the
traditional Japanese elite, whose involvement as innovators and importers
was so unexpected and, initially at least, unsought, could gradually and
consciously assume this role without fearing opposition.

The Creation of an Importing Class wh

Lastly, westernization has maintained itself by its own dynamic. In fact, it
supports the rise of an entirely new elite whose lasting quality is linked to
the safekeeping, indeed the reinforcement, of importation. From the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, the entourage of the traditional princes
was already composed of councillors, ministers, and courtiers who quickly
understood that the imitation of European constitutional models and prac-
tices could allow them to seize some of the power monopolized by the prince
and at the same time to acquire a minimum of autonomy and a mark of their
own identity. This was the comportment of the Egyptian Tahtawi, minister
of Ismail Khedive, and the Tunisian Khary ed-din, both prudent importers
but convinced of the principles of early nineteenth-century European polit-
ical liberalism. They admired the Orleans charter and successfully used con-
stitutional processes, representative institutions, and political debates to
create the conditions necessary to a political life and a public space in which
they would be pivotal.”

More profoundly, this reformist logic surpassed its creators to form a
new generation of westernized elites, who drew their basic resources from
their education in Western-influenced schools. Composed of doctors, en-
gineers, officers, and civil servants, these elites were directly absorbed by
the state or integrated into civil society, in journalistic, legal, or intellec-
tual sectors. In the first case, they very soon became linked with the state:
in the second, much more frequently, particularly in the Ottoman empire,
they took positions of control in political and administrative institutions,
where they found a legal-rational legitimacy that did not disguise its con-
formity to the Western model. This strategy, which was particularly that of
the Young Turks, led to a rapid increase in the logic of borrowing and chan-
neled political debate in the direction of conflicts among different concep-
tions of the practical means of westernization.”°

The prince’s vigorous efforts at importation only intensified the debate.
Here, as Ira Lapidus notes, the difference is clear between the “Ottoman

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES I1t3

world” in the larger sense and the other Asian Muslim countries. Colo-
nization is not a decisive variable and plays a much less decisive role than
the strategies deployed initially by the center. Under the khedive’s initia-
tive, Egypt was able to acquire a positivist-inspired civil elite that, though
threatened subsequently by the British protectorate, chose to strengthen
itself through its directorship of the Egyptian nationalist movement. Like
the Young Turks, adepts of a utilitarian secularism and seduced by Durk-
heim or Frédéric Le Play,* this national elite thought of itself as Saint-
Simonian and excluded the u/ama from its ranks. In contrast, the impor-
tation of models occurred much more evenly in Indonesia or Persia, for
example, where the westernized elite was more easily absorbed by the cen-
ter: relegated to subaltern administrative roles ( priyayi) where it was con-
sidered complicitous with the Dutch colonizers, in the case of Indonesia,
or completely co-opted by the neopatrimonial logic of the political system,
it left the task of mobilizing the opposition to the traditional religious
elite.” Thus in Iran the function of opposition crystallized around the aya-
tollah(s), leaving little room for the Mossadeghist movement, whereas in
Indonesia it was sparked by a coalition of ulama, merchants, and farmers,
embodied particularly in Sumatra by the Padri movement, which mobilized
coffee growers nervous about commercializing their production.

The unification of the political space around high-level secular person-
nel does not occur, however, without provoking negative, destabilizing ef-
fects. Deliberately excluded from political debate, the religious elite can
choose, as in Egypt, to play the card of communitarian investment, which
favors the constitution of countersocieties that transform protest into a way
out of the political system, as is attested by the reduction in the number of
small communities seeking total control of the individual by depriving him
of his role as citizen. Similarly, integration of the elite into westernizing
forces leads to their separation from the intermediate levels constituted by
minor civil servants, teachers, subaltern officers, and students, who are
precisely those led to express their bitterness toward a Western model to
which they have no real access.”” Inquiries regarding these groups within
the contemporary Egyptian population reveal the ambiguity of their atti-
tude toward the West, that is, their fascination and their fear, both domi-
nated in fact by a presentiment of menace, which is largely the combined ex-

*Translator’s Note: Frédéric Le Play (1806-82). A French engineer and economist,
he was the principal proponent of conservative and traditional social Catholicism.
His ideas influenced the late-nineteenth-century movement to restore authority to
landowners, bosses, and fathers.

II4 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

pression of their inability to gain entry into the higher, westernized spheres
of the state and civil society. Probably, for these reasons, the menace is per-
ceived essentially in cultural terms: the West is condemned because it saps
the values and modes of internal social structures, which progressively di-
vests middle-level individuals of resources that would provide them a basis
for their own identity.

This cultural tension reveals the extent of these two groups’ differences:
those intermediate individuals radicalized by virtue of their increasing
identification with traditional values and those leaders whose strength lies
in their capacity as professional importers of Western models. A similar
process occurs in the “Sanskritization” that M. N. Srinavas had already ob-
served in India in the 1950s. Excluded from a power strongly marked by the
predominance of Anglo-Saxon references, the middle classes reacted by in-
vesting symbolically in the apprenticeship and mastery of the more tradi-
tional cultural domains.”*

Other elements join with this dynamic to make it a veritable vicious cir-
cle. Not only does westernization survive on the elite that it maintains, but
it is nourished by its own failures. Confronted with power, the elite meas-
ures itself daily by the difficulties and tensions produced by development.
The impossibility of finding solutions to demographic, social, and eco-
nomic problems renders the leaders absolutely powerless, forcing them to
direct most of their political efforts in areas that are the least costly, the
most spectacular, and most able to sustain the relegitimation of increas-
ingly deficient leaders. This overvaluation of the political arena can appear
out of nowhere or in periods of crisis, but it takes the form of massive im-
portations of political practices and symbols from the West.

Zimbabwe, unable to control either agriculture or industry, tried to
build a petite bourgeoisie from the black population drawn from an active
Africanization of the public sector and the army, and also from an effective
economic support brought to the small sector represented by the black
agricultural producers who were able to export their goods (covering 4 per-
cent of the land). Whether from the interior or the exterior, this petite
bourgeoisie initially merely supported the state; henceforth, however, it
was not only bound to the state but also derived its identity from that con-
nection. Since it thus managed to distinguish itself from the large majority
of the African population, its method consisted—as it does to this day—in es-
pousing to a maximal degree the Western-style state symbolism that also
distances it from other civil social spaces.

The conservative strategy of the black petite bourgeoisie has its coun-

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES II5

terpart in most non-Western societies. It dips abundantly into the turn-of-
the-century state ideologies forged in the West when the underclasses
called for an active state intervention to redistribute wealth. Heard by
those in power, the eloquent discourse imported by the elite became a new
and unexpected form of westernization; it became even less of an appro-
priation in that it tended to imbue those at the summit of power with the
implicit logic of coexistence that belongs to every tribune. A barely soft-
ened Marxism in southern Africa, Baathism in the Middle East, Getulism
or Peronism in Latin America-—these ideologies reassure those in power
with a political grammar imported from the West, but which is compre-
hensible only to a state that retains its power and its exogenous nature.

However, the extension of the economic crisis into developing societies
seems to have triggered a substantial change. Politics of “structural adjust-
ment,’ which the Southern countries have gradually had to undergo, what-
ever their political orientation, mark a process of disengagement from the
state and thus the progressive abandonment of ideologies linked to its in-
terventionist efforts. Algeria presents a remarkable case in point. The FLN
ideology, which since independence has been marked profoundly by state
socialism, seems to have disappeared in favor of pragmatic concessions to
liberalism. Thus the second Algerian plan proclaims the need to spread the
costs of development among the state and other economic agents, from the
business community to private households. The founding myth of a public
sector responsible for development is explicitly surpassed by the an-
nounced will to satisfy social needs, to find new sources of financial sup-
port, and especially to help relieve the state of pressures from many aid re-
quests. The new Algerian technocratic elite needs, in fact, to differentiate
itself from the economic space, even at the cost of assuring the rise of the
private sector, in order to avoid the risk of being implicated in a dangerous
state bankruptcy. Hence the call for private savings, banking policies, and
calls for decentralization of authority over the business sector.”

This process of differentiation between the state and the economic sec-
tor means first of all a new convergence with the Western model of devel-
opment. The rejection or the marginalization of these ideologies expresses,
in fact, a functional banalization of the state and an alignment in terms ofa
duality between politics and economics. This process reflects the neoliber-
alism in effect in the West during the 1980s, which was holding to the idea
of a unique and universal way to handle crises. Far from weakening the po-
litical elite, neoliberalism guarantees its safety against the aftershocks the
state and its personnel would be sure to feel from economic collapse. On

116 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

the other hand, there are risks: the positions acquired by the state in the
economic sector are absolutely necessary in order to contain the emer-
gence of competitive forces. Similarly, the diffusion of socialist and depen-
dentist ideologies allows the state to exculpate itself from economic failures
by imputing them to the international capitalist system. By technologizing
the economy, the elite risk accelerating and feeling the full brunt of protest
activity, as was the case after the liberalization policies mounted by Sadat in
Egypt in 1977 (infitah),* or after the efforts of structural adjustment un-
dertaken first in the early 1980s in Tunisia and Morocco, then at the end of
that same decade in Algeria.

Importing Intellectuals

The intellectual’s role in westernization is paradoxical: identified with a
culture he holds within himself, he nevertheless imports a system of
thought and action from without. However, the intellectual’s path in the
Muslim world shows that the contradiction is easily explained. As the in-
ventor of his own space, the intellectual quickly finds himself in a double
opposition to both the constituted powers and the protests directed at them
by traditional sectors of society. As soon as he aspires to equip himself with
autonomous sources of power and to occupy a real position in society, he
runs up against both princely authoritarianism and the effects of a pure
and simple reproduction of religious knowledge that his own efforts cannot
contravene. The face-to-face encounter between neopatrimonial power
and ancestral tradition presents a fearsome obstacle to the professionaliza-
tion of the intellectual. For he can escape it only by a more or less massive
borrowing from foreign systems of thought, which itself brings other dan-
gers and other failures in its wake.

The itinerary followed by Hajj Seyyed Javadi, nicknamed the “Iranian
Sakharov,” is revealing. While in exile in Paris, he recalled the important
role he played in triggering the 1979 revolution, denouncing the rigorous
symmetry between the shah’s regime and that of Khomeini; he also re-
called that, as an intellectual, he could only be elsewhere: “When the shah
was in power, I was not allowed to leave Iran; now during the Islamic Re-
public, I cannot return.”*° Born in Qazvin in 1925, he completed his sec-
ondary and then university studies in Iran, and then went to France for four
years for his university education. After the coup d’état that ousted Mossa-

“Translator’s Note: The infitah was Sadat’s effort to open Egypt to the West,
which exacerbated the economic crisis and triggered the insurrection of 1977.

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES zI7

degh, he worked as a journalist and writer, a time punctuated by arrests,
clandestine activity, and censure. Shortly before the revolution, he wrote
two “open letters” to the shah, denouncing authoritarianism and corrup-
tion, and citing words used by Vaclav Havel to Husak. These letters were
enormously successful and spread like wildfire from the university to the
bazaars, playing a major role in prerevolutionary mobilization. With
Bazargan,* Javadi created the National League for the Defense of Human
Rights and fought “for a regime where the king must reign without gov-
erning, for free elections, for freedom of expression, the emancipation of
women, the separation of powers, the independence of parliament, the
forming of a constitutional assembly, and the defense of political prison-
ers.” After proclaiming a state of siege, he wrote an “Open Letter to the
Army,” for which he was arrested. Once Khomeini attained power, he re-
acted to one of the Imam’s first speeches, in which he called upon women
to wear the chador, by denouncing the “noise of fascist boots.”

Hajj Seyyed Javadi lived primarily in Iran and was awakened to political
consciousness by sentiments of revolt against “the colonial situation in an
Iran then pulled between Russia and Great Britain,” which made “the fight
against imperialism” the major element in his engagement. He had none-
theless, however, developed the basics of his political thought from a West-
ern intellectual production: from his discovery, at age twelve, of Jean Valjean,
and his readings in Rousseau and Montesquieu; to his wartime engagement
within the communist movement, his participation in the Tudeh Party, his
adherence to Marxism, from which he later distanced himself, and his admi-
ration for Pierre Mendés France, whom he considered his model.

Hajj Seyyed Javadi acknowledges that Marxism was nothing other than
an imported product, and he remembers having come to it in a context
where he had lost all historical memory: “When I was twenty, I had no
memory of [ran’s past. Dictatorship had suppressed all celebrations of the
past, with the exception of the king’s and the martyr Hussein’s birthdays.
The accession of Reza Shah was the only moment in our history that we
could celebrate. Marxism was acceptable for a generation that had no
memory of the past.” This flight toward elsewhere and toward abroad
seemed the only coherent way to withdraw from a political system that re-
jected debate and to construct a place for oneself in a society where tradi-
tion blocks any invention of other models: “Persian society was very

*Translator’s Note: Mehdi Bazargan (1905-95), a reformist Muslim intellectual.
He was named the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic by the Ayatollah
Khomeini in 1979. He resigned after the taking of the U.S. hostages later that year,
fed up with the fundamentalist radicalism of the Iranian revolution.

118 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

quickly engulfed by an unrestricted Islam. Moreover, violent contacts with
Arabs and Timorese Mongolians prevented any stabilization of Persian
thought. From the time of the Safavids, everything was included in reli-
gion; all cultural poles were closed by theology, Arabic grammar, the fikh.”

The way out was henceforth very clear: borrowing Western ideas of
modernity, rationality, and sovereignty allowed an escape from the dilemma
of a sociopolitical order that offered no role to the intellectual. By opposing
Western culture made of rationality to the “Asian culture” of. “fatalism,
death and the other world,” the intellectual designates the place where he
can realize his own power. Reason and sovereignty are the two qualities that
restore to man the possibility of creating, of inventing outside institutional
tutelage; modernity constitutes the legitimization of the work of invention
that he sees as his own. Referring to the Aga Khan, Pirnia (Mushired-
Dawle), and Mossadegh, whom he considers the first modern Iranian intel-
lectuals, Javadi emphasizes that all three began to rationalize the system by
separating power and religion, whereas the establishment of a theory of na-
tional sovereignty dominated the 1906 Persian revolution, from which re-
sulted the first constitution.

However, two paradoxes derive from the professionalization of the in-
tellectual. The work of invention that he claims justifies his professional-
ization quickly evolves into the work of importation. Assigning himself a
creative role in the short term, and participating in importation in order to
define his functions, reinforces borrowing at the expense of production.
For Seyyed Javadi the state is characterized by the separation of powers, the
parliamentary system, and regional elections; the republic is definitely
modeled after the West, and secularism has to come about “without hurt-
ing religion,” even if the Arabic and Persian vocabularies have no term to
designate what can be called oda 7, which in Persian means “separation,”
without mention of its object. In addition, the price to pay is a distance
from the people: the Persian intellectual does not have in the 1979 revolu-
tion the same status as the intellectual of the French Revolution, for his
chances to communicate are of the very weakest. The price of this hopeless
rupture is a perpetual exclusion, a permanent exile that the intellectual
can stand only with the help of developmentalist arguments, by complain-
ing of the “backwardness” of the people and their lack of culture—a cum-
bersome proof that draws its actor into a forced westernization.

Significantly, the synthesis between westernization and cultural back-
wardness is brought about with the idea of nation: the authoritarian re-
gime, like the people nourished by tradition, “causes the failure of the na-

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES Itg

tional construction.” The regime does it through self-interest, dividing to
govern, distancing itself to avoid redistribution, fragmenting to avoid
protest. The people do it by an excess of identification with traditional, eth-
nic, tribal, village, or familial communities. The result is negative in that it
incites irresponsibility and dictatorship. On the other hand, the intellectual
is the “only one in a position to create the nation,” to diffuse national sen-
tment, to teach its virtues. This function completes his position of power:
by supporting the dismantling of traditional sociopolitical structures, di-
minishing the function of mediation held by the peripheral authorities in
the definition of legitimation, and creating conditions of ideological debate
and the formation of a public space, this function confers a genuine status
on the intellectual, which he could not obtain in any other way. Further-
more, this function makes the intellectual into the importer of Western
constructions of nationalism and the idea of nation. Thus to the idea of the
national state, Seyyed Javadi gives primacy over all other political action,
seeing it as the central element in the conception of the ideal city.

Hajj Seyyed Javadi’s adventure is not unique; all non-Western societies
are acutely marked by this same tension between an authoritarian regime
and a tradition endowed with a strong capacity for social control, as in the
Muslim world and as in the worlds of India and Japan. The formation of a
class of intellectuals differentiated from society is first of all imputable to
the spread of education that dominated the nineteenth century: the estab-
lishment of Saint-Simonian schools in Egypt, the rise of a positivist-
inspired academic current in Turkey, the increasing success of Christian
schools, and also of Masonic lodges in Syria. It relates equally to the new
mobility of children of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, who continued
their studies in the West. Thus, among the new Ottoman intellectuals in
the nineteenth century, Ibrahim Sinasi studied public finance in Paris;
Ahmed Riza pursued agricultural studies in Grignon; and the Syrian Mi-
chel Aflak studied at the Sorbonne from 1928 to 1933.”°

The strategy of these intellectuals who separated themselves from a
strongly integrated sociopolitical order was first of all to acquire a very
strong network of associative solidarity that gradually accentuated their
identity as importers. The creation of journals played a decisive role inas-
much as the model of the Western press was a privileged source of influ-
ence. Thus it was in the Ottoman regimes of Takvimi Veka’i, founded in
1831, of Terjumani Ahval, begun in 1860, and especially of Tasviri Efkyar,
who supported by Ibrahim Sinasi, appeared on the scene in 1862 upon his
return from France and at a time when he was involved in extensive trans-

I20 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

lations of French literature into Turkish. The rise of literary salons, such as
those of Amy Kher or Marie Cavadia, fulfilled the same function of socia-
bility in Egypt between the two world wars, where westernized intellectuals
cultivated their distinctness and strengthened the value of their role by ad-
dressing each other with honorific titles. There were also libraries, such as
Henri Curiel’s, in the center of Cairo, and especially the numerous more or
less secret “societies” founded by Boutros Al-Bustani at the end of the last
century, in part under the influence of American Protestant missions, such
as the Association of Turk Derneye founded by the Young Turks in 1908
and the Arab Syrian Congress held for the first time in Paris in 1913.”

This associative logic certainly solidified the autonomy of the new intel-
lectuals. The way they extricated themselves from politics also helped. In
the beginning, they were all linked with the Western model of the state, in
conformity with their vision of the universal and the rational, which corre-
sponded closely with their identity. As children of the upper administrative
cadres or themselves in that position, they expressed a close solidarity be-
tween their status and the political usage of reason: Abd al-Haqq Hamid
was the ambassador to Paris, London, and Brussels; [brahim Sinasi inter-
rupted his career as writer and journalist to work in the upper administra-
tive echelons of the Department of Education; the father of the Egyptian
Georges Rassim was himself ambassador to Rome, Madrid, and Prague; the
Persian Forughi held the highest government positions, just as did the
Tunisian Khayred-Din and the Egyptian Tahtawi. When they were not sons
of this intellectual caste, politicians marked their attachment to the state
by acquiring the attributes of an intellectual: the Persian prime ministers
Vosuq Dawle and Qavam Saltaneh pursued parallel careers as translators,
and Gamal Abdel Nasser—an assiduous reader of Victor Hugo, Dickens,
Napoleon, and Rousseau—wrote an article on Voltaire entitled “Man and
Liberty” as well as works on military science and history.”®

It is evident that, materially, this link can be undone when the intellec-
tual enters into conflict with the state, of which he very quickly became the
victim. It is equally clear that the situation became more complex when
certain intellectuals thought it a good move to tap into a revivalist con-
struction that would denounce the exogenous nature of the Western state.
The depth of their original connections, however, can not be totally de-
nied. The abandonment of all references to state and nation resulted in too
great a loss of autonomy and even identity for the intellectual to resolve.
The Baathists make this an essential mark of their discourse; as for Islamic
intellectuals, they make it the major argument for their separation from

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES I2I

the clerical elite: Abol Hassan Banisadr sees in the reference to the nation
the source of his fundamental distinction from Khomeini;”? the Tunisian
Ghanushi in no way rejects the concepts of state and nation.

The Indian nationalist movement in general, and the Congress Party in
particular, abound with this type of intellectual, who has participated ac-
uvely in the construction of the Western-configured state that India cur-
rently possesses. In the beginning, the Indian Association, founded in 1876
and supported by a series of journals, was effectively constituted by a
group of Westernized Indian intellectuals working to create an indepen-
dent nation-state. Its creator, Surendranath Banerjea, had shown his at-
tachment to Western state structures by successfully passing the entrance
exams for the Indian civil service. Having resigned from his position, he
traveled to England and returned to India to combine work as an English
professor with the promotion of the Indian nationalist movement. His
work, A Nation in the Making, seis the year of his death, pepeeks 1 in
terms of Western nationalism.*°

In 1925 Sarojini Naidu became the first woman to preside over a session

of the Congress Party. A Brahmin and a poet, she also held a doctorate from
the University of Edinburgh; she knew Britain, wrote in the English lan-
guage, and was a militant nationalist. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, one of the
greatest contemporary philosophers of Hinduism, was able to combine
even more significantly Hindu references with a Western education, na-
tionalist militancy, and service to the state. As holder of the Chair of Ori-
ental Religions at Oxford, he militated from within the Congress Party for
India’s independence; then he began a long political and administrative ca-
reer that took him to Moscow as ambassador, and then to the presidency of
the republic. Written in English, certain of his works have contributed sig-
nificantly to the work of reconciling East and West, for example, East and
West in Religion and Eastern Religion and Western Thought. Rabindranath
Tagore is hardly an exception. As the most eminent representative of mod-
ern culture, he most distinctly combines Western borrowings with nation-
alist expression. After having divided his formative years between Calcutta
and Great Britain, he joined the nationalist movement in 1905. He wrote in
Bengali as much as in English, being as much a spokesman for Indian pa-
triotism (Nationalism, 1917) as for a universalist religious belief (7he Reli-
gion of Man, 1920).”!

Finally, one can cite numerous cases within the intellectual class, where
Western influences are felt as well as an attraction for the state. In London
Ramesh Chandra Datta passed the Indian civil service exam and later read

I22 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

Indian history at the University of London. He subsequently returned to In-
dia, where he worked for the state of Baroda and pursued a career as writer,
publishing works on Indian history and translating the Mahabharata and
the Ramayana into English. His namesake Michael Madhusudana Datta
even converted to Christianity. In his native language, Bengali, he wrote
several dramas, one of which was directly inspired by the //iad and another
by Shakespeare, as well as numerous poems, some of which were inspired
by Ovid and others by the Fables of La Fontaine.*

The function of the intellectual in the context of the J apanese Meiji is
comparable to that observed in the Muslim and Indian worlds, in that it ac-
tively participates in the process of westernization. The risk of a break with
tradition and thus political marginalization, however, was less because
Japanese political culture rests more on the affirmation of the divine rights
of imperial dynasties than on a complex religious knowledge claiming to
constitute a political doctrine. Thus westernization of thought could occur
in a less conflictual manner. Westernization of education was officially be-
gun in 1872, and the interdiction against Christianity was practically elimi-
nated in 1873. Most of the intellectuals who imported Western models came
from modest samurai families who had experienced Western languages and
sought in such an investment to compensate for the weakening of their sta-
tus following the crisis in feudal society and their subsequent marginaliza-
tion. Just as significantly, their insertion into active life came about either
by the acquisition of powerful positions in associative networks, or by their
integration into the modern state. They spread among the Movement for
Liberty and People’s Rights (the first political party, created in 1874), and
the Society of Year Six, which more extensively represented intellectual
elitism. The latter founded the Review of Year Six, begun by Mori Arinori,
a onetime minister of education, around which clustered Nishi Amane,
Tsuda Mamichi, and Kato Hiroyuki (all three senior civil servants), and es-
pecially Fukuzawa,* the greatest of the Meiji intellectuals.

Seeking to break with a shogunate that increasingly excluded them,
these intellectuals became promoters of a reason more practical than
philosophical; they bypassed traditional social structures without over-
turning the current religious and cultural order, which allowed them to ac-
quire a major role in the definition of a new constitutional order and to le-
gitimize a process of social ascent that they and others like them wanted.

*Translator’s Note: Yukichi Fukuzawa (1834-1901), author of numerous works
that helped to introduce Western civilization into Japan. He fought for the estab-
lishment of a constitutional monarchy.

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES I23

Hence the importance of works that diffused Western law, notably Kato’s;
hence translations of Hobbes, Montesquieu, de Tocqueville, Bentham, and
Rousseau’s Social Contract by Nakae Chomin, himself named the “Rous-
seau of the Orient.” Hence also the translations of the Christian Naka-
mura, who provided a Japanese version of John Stuart Mill as early as 1871,
at the same time he translated one of the greatest literary successes of the
period, Se/f Help by Samuel Smiles, a veritable defense of social ascension
and individual success, both of which were conceived as the result of moral
experience, work, perseverance, and frugality.**

According to Fukuzawa’s formulas, the intention was to “leave Asia,” to
reconstruct a Japanese national character within the West. Because of the
vagueness of political models that wavered between German statism, Eng-
lish hberalism, and French democracy, the task consisted in marrying ra-
tional individualism with Japanese tradition, of promoting the individual
seeking happiness and interest by reason, and condemning outmoded ideas
in order to better express the frustration of intellectuals as victims of rigid
social structures.** This type of borrowing was situated at the exact inter-
section of collective and individual rationality. The collective rationality
was that of the traditional oligarchies dispossessed by the shogunate; “in-
dividual rationality” reflected the features needed by the new intellectuals
in order to establish themselves as an autonomous category.

The Protesters

The role of protest could seem, a priori, to escape the logic of importation.
Is it not an increasingly explicit rejection of or challenge to attacks against
independence, against traditional culture and the symbolic structures of
the national collectivity? Yet the practice of protest is itself a carrier of
westernization, even if the diversity of its origins and orientations makes it
a complex and multiform process. The intellectual himself, through his
discourse and actions, can be a producer of protest, just like the rest of the
liberal political elite, forged, as we have seen, in the very structure of the
Western-style state edifice. Both of these actors are, by definition, carriers
of values and modes of protest that come from without. But protest can also
come from the traditional elite, the very ones who rise up against such ac-
tions and feel threatened by them. Far from being marginal, such action by
the traditional elite plays a central role because it corresponds with the
people, who often seek to understand the transformation or mutilation of
their symbolic universe. This protest, essentially a cultural one, can be ex-

I24 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

pressed directly, by mobilizing around its own discourse or, most often, in-
directly, by articulating all sorts of protests linked precisely to state con-
struction. In both cases, its insertion into the political scene converts it, e1-
ther manifestly or latently, into a vector of messages that it had previously
opposed or that it continues to simultaneously oppose. More paradoxically
perhaps, the context of its action is not the only factor. Protest strategy it-
self very quickly becomes the carrier of this perverse effect and—in order to
conceal its shifts—the producer of an often surprising discourse.

The insertion into the political scene reveals the trap westernization
lays for those who rise up against it. Abol Hassan Banisadr tells how the Ay-
atollah Khomeini’s behavior changed along with the growing Islamic revo-
lution, which he hoped to lead. “At Nadjaf, Khomeini did not want to hear
anything about the nation because he opposed the idea of national sover-
eignty, since sovereignty was God’s alone, and the nation had been im-
posed by the West. In Paris, he was made to understand that one could not
at one and the same time ask the people to rise up and to refuse it sover-
eignty. Khomeini accepted this, and then proclaimed that he wanted a na-
tional state. He also agreed to speak in terms of independence, democracy,
and progress. Once back in Teheran, he again challenged what we others
considered as acquired.”*°

This type of shift is very common in the history of Islamic protest. It had
already clearly appeared with nineteenth-century revivalism, its first oc-
currence. The context itself weighed heavily on the situation. Since it chal-
lenged sultanic despotism, this current converged with the liberal move-
ments unfolding in Europe; fighting against a tradition that dispossessed
it, it willingly affiliated with the themes of progress that sprang from a Eu-
rope fully immersed in industrialization; mistrusting certain constrictions
of the state, such as the strong tax system, it drew freely from protest modes
adapted to the emergence of a strong monopolizing center, such as the first
Western social movements constructed; finally, joining a pioneering fight
against the first active manifestations of European imperialism, it in-
evitably acquired a nationalist discourse invented in the West and that it
could only with difficulty combine with the tenets of the Umma, much less
those of Arabism. This adventure, incarnated by men such as Afghani, Ab-
duh, Rashid Rida, or Mawdudi, is not even proper to Islam. It is found in
struggles for Indian independence against the secularism of the Congress,
in the actions of the Hindu Mahasabha or in that of Dharma Sangh de

Svami Karpatri, and, after 1947, with Jana Sangh or the Bharatiya Lok Dal
de Charan Singh.*°

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES I25

The actors in Iran’s Islamic revolution willingly expressed their the-
matic dependence on values they received from Western revolutionary
protest. Thus one mujahideen militant proclaimed himself a “socialist
Muslim” who “based his socialism on democracy.” He willingly acknowl-
edged that he drew inspiration from other democracies: “[we combine
them] with our nationalism, our national culture; it is important for us”
and then: “All Iranians who lived in France have been influenced by this
democratic culture.” Another mujahideen recognizes the combined effect
of the influence of two revolutions, Russian and French. From the first, he
retains the promotion of “economic equality among individuals”; from the
second, he highlights the importation of the concepts of liberty and equal-
ity not limited to the economic sphere. He concludes by recognizing that
“modernization in Iran occurred with France as intermediary.” *”

In reality, the possibilities of escaping this logic are slim, and experi-
ence has shown that to build a strategy on the principle of avoidance leads
to perverse results. The example of the Vlama Association, created in 1931
in Algeria by Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis, is illustrative. To protect a
group that felt threatened and deprived, the Association presented itself as
a “religious organization whose goal was to defend Islam through educa-
tion in the Arabic language and glorification of the past, in order to demon-
strate the enduring nature of the Algerian nation.”** On the basis of this
objective, the Association, in contrast to the North African Star and later
the Algerian People’s Party, made no concession to the Western model of
protest strategy and rhetoric. Proclaiming the inseparability of politics and
religion, it counted essentially on a cultural effort aiming to save the Mus-
lim community by a return to the Koran, to its lessons and direction. “Re-
sisting the fascination for the West” required the promotion of the genuine
spirit of Islam. Hence the Association’s first priority was to increase the
number of public schools teaching in Arabic.

This imperviousness to Western methods of partisan mobilization came,
however, at a price. Unlike the development begun by revivalism, the Asso-
ciation’s strategy left no room for any type of political autonomy and thus
did not need to make room for any of the themes traditionally associated
with it. Political by destination and according to a model perfectly congru-
ent with Islamic culture, the Association’s actions had to do only with its re-
ligious orientation and its project to reconstruct the Muslim community
apart from all borrowings from Western nationalist ideology. The Vlama
Association went even further: in its eyes, no party could represent the

Umma or even speak in the name of Islam; no partisan organization could

126 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

claim legitimacy. The official political scene, that of the amr, held only sec-
ondary importance, so the Association need have nothing to do with it,
which, paradoxically but inevitably, led Ben Badis to pay only slight atten-
tion to colonial power, and even, according to some, to accommodate it.
Considering that the idea of nationality could refer only to Islam, the
sheykh in fact distinguished a cultural nationality (jyenstyya gawmiyya)
from a political nationality ( jensiyya siyassiyya): the first draws cultural re-
sources from language and religion and finds its most natural expression in
the wlama; the second refers to the articulation of rights and duties of citi-
zenship, but allows for no autonomous political action that would reconst-
tute partisanship, as Messali Hadj or Ferhat Abbas had tried to do.

Thus the Association limited itself to the conquest of civil society, and
eventually dissociated itself from the PPA, which, in order to denounce
French colonialism, declared itself a party and espoused methods of politi-
cal mobilization proper to left-wing French parties, and began to use a na-
tionalist rhetoric forged essentially in the West. The Algerian state derives
indirectly from subsequent partisan organizations, notably the NLF; and it
draws its westernized state and national identity from this ideological
source, which privileges cultural “purity,” though it is true that indepen-
dence and revolution are not concrete objectives within the contemporary
interstate community. That the Vlama Association and the thought of Ben
Badis have deeply influenced contemporary Algerian nationalism, no one
has any doubt, as the practice of Arabization reveals. Nevertheless, neither
one has been able to extricate itself from the dilemma of cultural autocracy
and political ineffectiveness.

This is not an isolated example. Throughout Islam quietist movements
have developed a conception of action aligned strictly according to tradi-
tion, but that makes no political concessions. The Iranian akhbaris, by ac-
cepting inspiration from tradition only, acknowledge their own incompe-
tence in political matters.*’ They have followed the example of Ben Badis by
playing an important role in socialization, in diffusion of religious values,
and repression of deviant sects (notably the Baha’is); they probably con-
tributed significantly to paving the way for the Islamic revolution. Though
they rejected all political action and all partisan structuration, they were
nevertheless quickly surpassed by the wsudi, who recognized a political au-
thority in the marja’ taglid (ayatollah, a model to follow because of his
knowledge); and in the prerevolutionary context they were surpassed by the
Sadequiyyeh branch, who, though a minority group, were determined to ac-
quire all the thematic and organizational instruments of a Western-style par-

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES I27

tisan action. Here we find the opposition between two ayatollahs, Khomeini
and Shari’at Madari. The radicalism of the first prevailed over the modera-
tion of the second, just as open political protest proved more effective than
the political procrastination of the quietist attitude. The Islamic Brother-
hood itself, just like all Islamist movements, was able to act based on a con-
ception of political mobilization inspired more by Leninism than Muslim
tradition. Their tribunes, their organization, their method of action, drew
more from Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done than from the Koran.

In India, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Association (RSS) found itself
confronted with two similar choices. A militant and exclusively Hindu
group, the RSS was created in 1925 to fight against the British presence; it
was also involved in violence, such as the assassination of Gandhi. Thus it
bore no resemblance to the Ulama Association.*° Like that Association,
however, it rejected all partisan orientation and professed strictly cultural
origins for itself; furthermore, it declared the same rejection of political ac-
tion, the same active militancy in favor of restoring a sociopolitical order
inspired directly by the endogenous culture, and especially the same will to
dismantle Western political categories. Thus the RSS vehemently rejected
the Western concept of nationalism; it denounced the ideas of borders and
territory, and its founder, Hedgewar, considered the valorization of the
territorial vision of the nation a “slave mentality” and declared the goal of
his organization as the liberation of Hindu society from the degeneration
and demoralization the West had inflicted upon it. More precisely still, and
closer to the Islamic themes mentioned above, Madhav Sadashiv Gol-
walkar distinguished between a cultural nationalism and a territorial one,
in order to defend the first and reject the second.*!

Thus the RSS was political only in its goal: essentially cultural, it was first
of all Hindu, excluding from its ranks Buddhists and Jains. Its project
blended with that of Hinduism. Though it condemned Western-style secu-
larism, the RSS accepted certain of its aspects in order to valorize the plu-
rality of Hindu theologies. Finally, its strategy can be appreciated only in re-
lation to its cultural essence. Just as with many Islamist movements, the
RSS distinguished state from society in order to denigrate and marginalize
the first. As an expression of the sacred, society can be nothing less than
above the state, which is merely a surface addition, imposed from without,
an abusive confiscator of sovereignty that loses all meaning in its hands, but
to which the RSS, on the other hand, can lay claim due to its nature and di-
vine consecration. Thus all effort was concentrated on organizing the mili-
tants, on their education, their apprenticeship in a role destined to cut them

128 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

off from the state, or in any case, limit their allegiance to it. Regarding the
Congress, the RSS chose a strict opposition: not only to construct a nation-
state in order to control it, but to eradicate a state and national logic conso-
nant with Western values in order to reconstruct Hindu society elsewhere.
Thus Gandhi and his cohorts denounced this movement as “totalitarian”
and even “racist,” noting Golwalkar’s use of the idea of “Hindu race’ and
the assertion of its superiority. This polemic, which quickly reached the
level of murderous violence, clearly indicates the bifurcation between two
strategies, that of the Congress, which chose westernization as a vector of
the conquest of power, and that of the RSS, which built its identity and mo-
bilization effort around the refusal of any concession from the official polit-
ical authorities and as a function of a strictly cultural affirmation.

In this context, the strategic evolution of the RSS is as surprising as it is
significant. Once independence was attained and the new political scene
institutionalized, it slowly evolved to embrace all the various partisan
groups. Though it initially functioned only for religious celebrations, such
as the crowning of Rama and Shiva, the RSS later acquired, with the Jana
Sangh (which became BJP in 1977), a political arm whose structures gradu-
ally became electoral circumscriptions, with its members taking roles un-
der diverse headings in Parliament. Particularly, the growing opposition to
Indira Gandhi, who as of 1973 tried to outlaw the RSS, brought it to modify
its plans significantly. The deliberate will not to lose (by being declared il-
legal) and to try to win (at a time when the renewal of electoral successes of
the Congress Party was becoming problematic) led it to join the electoral
coalition, which was victorious in 1977, to transform its platform and aban-
don in partits religious thematic for talk about prices and corruption, thus
presenting an apology for democracy in order to fight against “dictator-
ship.” This turnabout was, of course, due to the simple “attraction to the
system” that allowed it, moreover, to be directly associated with power in
several states; but even more, it meant the tactical rediscovery of state be-
yond nation, the need—in order to gain strength-to participate in a strug-
gle for power that quickly veered toward a return to themes more populist
than cultural and more statist than democratic.

Such a process in no way entails a loss of cultural references to identity.
Neither Islamist movements nor Hinduist organizations renounced—or
even wished to renounce—an investment in tradition, that is, the powerful
need for meaning that originates precisely in the context of a growing west-
ernization. However, in both these cases, the dilemma of power appears
immediately: the discourse of mobilization is effective and credible only if

IMPORTERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES I29

it leads to a discourse of conquest of the decision-making places that re-
quire techniques and themes borrowed from the West. One quickly arrives
at the syncretic forms that derive from a neopopulism wherein Western ref-
erences to a sovereign people mix with endogenous cultural reference to a
tradition and a system of meaning accessible to the masses.

In Algeria, if one analyzes the words of the Islamist Mahfoud Nahnah
used in the rhetoric of the Islamic Salvation Movement to characterize the
state, one sees the intensity of this heteroclite formation: legal state, pro-
tection of basic human rights, Arabism, nationalism, democracy, brother-
hood, solidarity, rejection of alienation, application of the sharia. Islam is
understood as: “State, faith, law, book, sword, ethnicity, nation, ethics,
conduct,” whereas “Islamic economic theory” implies the “equitable and
just distribution of wealth, encouragement of initiative, establishment of
social justice, self-sufficiency . . . , the cultivation of human values previ-
ously denied” (by “the Western economic alternative: capitalism or social-
ism”). This melting pot of themes taken from various Western sources and
endogenous references dulls the discourse, blurs it into the most complete
imprecision, and in fact stabilizes it into a tribune-based populism.**

Western references tend to fulfill a threefold function within protest dis-
course. First they aim to distinguish a space of thought and of action
proper to Western history that is both valorized and presented as universal.
Following the example of Afghani or Abduh, modern Islamists willingly
take account of what has made the West successful and of what therein can
be found in Islam as well. Thus it was with technological progress, but also
with the values of democracy and liberty. The Moroccan Islamist Ab-
dessalem Yassin agreed that the values discovered in the west by Abduh-
“liberty, property . . . , organization, technology, social peace”—could also
be found in Islam;** the Tunisian Ghanushi even seems prepared to “re-
deem” the modern state, as well as the parties and political institutions
forged in the West.* Thus an entire essential part of Western production is
recomposed as culturally neutral, in a way that legitimates its adoption by
Islamist movements and facilitates their mobility on the political scene, the
definition of their options and their political strategy.

At the same time, Western references legitimate a space of particularity.
That the balance sheet of Western history is not entirely negative in no way
justifies the “amazement” it inspires in certain elite members of the Mus-
lim world. Even more, since it is culturally materialist, the West cannot fail
to “betray” its ideals of brotherhood, liberty, and justice. Islamist move-
ments disappear when a new model of the state needs inventing, when a

130 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

new utopia needs to be shaped; they thus recycle their distinction from the
West to both legitimize their reappropriation of history and to assert the
superiority of their own political formula over that of their political com-
petitors who neglect or fight against all efforts at the expression of identity.
Finally, according to this logic, reference to the West serves, negatively,
to delegitimate the initiatives of the other. This construction appears in
striking fashion in the discourse of Abol Hassan Banisadr, who without re-
lying on the most radical Islamist influence, places his political action at
the intersection “of the ideals of liberty, peeacrnity; social revolution, and
Islam.” Thus the Pahlavi regime was denounced as “exteriorized,” that is,
as an essentially Western production. More strangely, but much more sig-
nificantly, the velayat-e-fakih (government by jurisconsult) established by
Khomeini was criticized and refuted as being a “Western idea,” “derived
from the theory of papal sovereignty” and incompatible with Islam. “Fun-
damentalism” underwent the same scrutiny, whereas the secularism sup-
ported by the former president was presented, in order to better distin-
guish himself from Khomeini, as “defined in the Koran,” as “deriving from
Islam and not the New Testament which, in contrast, affirms the total sov-
ereignty of God” where the Koran “places responsibility with man.”*°

4- Imported Products

| | Meee does not simply mean imitation. It includes the idea that the
imported product is dysfunctional. Developmentalists presume that West-
ern models of government will diffuse without rupture of meaning and
without provoking new dysfunctions through cultural dissonance. Chal-
lenges to this belief, however, have manifestly reversed the former conclu-
sions of the development theory. Since imported products lose their func-
tion, that is, their effectiveness and their power, they take on new meanings
that tend to reconstruct the political scene into which they are inserted,
with the result that the political scene becomes even more dependent. In
addition, this same process applies to both the normative system and the
ideological expression and content of political debate.

Imported Politics

In the first place, the example of political parties is particularly striking.
As an instrument of participation and political mobilization, partisan or-
ganization was constituted in the last century in the West in order to or-
ganize a political order that had been shaken by the progressive introduc-
tion of universal suffrage. Since it was destined to manage the electoral
population, it became, according to the well-known expression of the fa-
mous Norwegian political thinker Stein Rokkan, the agent of integration
and conflict: integration of a collectivity marked henceforth by political
solidarities, linked by a common citizenship and shared beliefs; conflict

132 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

within the center of a society divided by differences and the free play of
competition for power.

Behind this double function, which quickly became the natural rhythm
of the partisan dynamic, there quickly appeared three non-exportable
characteristics proper to the West. First, the liberation of the modes of
communalization: with the individualization of social relations and, cor-
relatively, of association, the loss of community solidarity in the nineteenth
century initiated, if not a demand, at least a potential for partisan mobi-
lization that brought satisfaction to the individual adherent, which led We-
berian sociologists to envisage the party as a “sociation.”* Next, electoral
mobilization: the West intimately blended party and power by synchroniz-
ing the formation of political parties with the extension of the franchise,
whereas in colonized countries, parties were constituted essentially in or-
der to claim independence and solidify the more nationalist types of behav-
ior. Instead of competing for power, these parties were created to provide a
more united force against the tutelary power. Finally, the invention of par-
tisanship in the West, where it often took several centuries for complex so-
cial cleavages to be established, and these nourished both the associative
dynamic and the competition for power: strong horizontal solidarities
could develop from these long-enduring cleavages, whereas in Africa or
Asia long-standing vertical solidarities and various clientelist relations cre-
ate a more factional political competition that disrupts the principal func-
tions of partisanship. In a political confrontation dominated by this logic,
the implementation of development procedures, joint interests, and mili-
tant education probably loses any chance of being effective or even of ex-
isting at all.

On the other hand, the importation of partisan logic responds to other
strategic considerations that carry other functions: to serve as an exit from
an outdated political order where dependence and tradition are closely in-
tertwined; to act as a relay for political communication; and to allow for
control of a political scene that does not proceed, at least primarily, from
the freely competitive exercise of universal suffrage. The logic of exit is par-
adoxically the principal source of the dynamic of imitation. In order to gain
independence the elite among the dominated groups freely borrowed or-
ganizational structures from colonial powers. The example of francophone
Africa is, from this point of view, remarkable, with the creation at the end
of World War II of the first large parties in Africa, the Rassemblement dé-
mocratique africain (RDA) being the first.* The symbols, structures, pro-
grams, and ideologies of these parties were learned and transmitted by the

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 133

first African deputies at the Palais-Bourbon, such as Félix Houphouét-
Boigny, Modibo Keita, or Hubert Maga, and were often presented as mod-
eled on French left-wing parties. The imitation was all the stronger because
by it independence could be gained by and for these elites, but only if it was
built on a strong political base, that is to say, a base voluntarily ignorant of
traditional sociocultural parameters, and was resolutely mimetic, that is to
say, mimetic in the context of an institutional competence learned by its
members that distinguished it from other potential authorities. The rup-
ture thus came about through imitation, a mode that was not unique to this
region of the world. This was precisely the course of action chosen by the
Congress Party, as well as by the Ba’ath, who very early wore the colors of
an Arab nationalism learned in the Christian schools of Lebanon and as a
benefit of contacts solidified by its leaders with European socialist parties.

This last example suggests already that even when it makes a brutal and
radical break, the nationalist-inspired party does not lack for Western fea-
tures, though the identity of the sources tends to change.* The Syrian Na-
tional Socialist Party (SNSP, al Hizb al gawmi al ijtima7i as-suriyye) was
founded in Beirut in November 1932 by Antun Saada, who evoked a lan-
guage, practice, and symbolism that owed much to visits by its principal
leaders to fascist Germany and Italy, and was completed by Saada’s own ex-
periences in the Brazilian society of Getul,* where he had been exiled. The
thematics of “natural Syria,” the promotion of secularism, the separation
of church and state, thus structured a discourse brought by a hierarchized,
autocratic, and military organization copied rather largely from the Italian
Fascist Party and the German NSDAP. The same can be said for the Leb-
anese Phalanges (Kataeb) created by Pierre Gemayel in 1936 and trans-
formed into a political party in 1952, based on the same sources of imita-
tion he absorbed during his visits to the same places. Likewise, the Young
Egypt Party, founded in 1933 by Ahmad Hussein and Fathi Radwan, early
ancestor of the Workers Party (Hizb al Amal), expressed an exacerbated
nationalism with themes and methods borrowed from the same repertoire:
green-shirted militants swearing oaths of allegiance and the constitution of
a discourse on nation that mixed pharaonic and Islamic references with a
denunciation of the Wafd “plutocracy.”

Marxist and socialist-democratic influences are even more numerous.
They are evident in the communist parties found throughout the world.
They are also seen in the movements that, given the means they had to de-

*Translator’s Note: The Society of Getul. Named after Getulio Vargas, who estab-
lished a populist and nationalist regime in Brazil in 1930.

134 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

ploy, aligned more or less with socialist-inspired models. When it was vig-
orous, the struggle for independence promoted the theme of the “avant-
garde” party; for example, it brought the Algerian NLF considerably closer
to the Leninist model, particularly in its call for a unanimous national mo-
bilization legitimated very early on its status as the government’s sole
party. The PAIGC (African Independence Party of Guinea-Bissau) evolved
in the same way, as did the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of
Angola), the FRELIMO of Mozambique, and the ZANU of Zimbabwe. In all
these cases, it was basically the factionalism and rivalry among potential
leaders seeking within the repertory of international ideologies a sign that
could distinguish them from each other that activated the logic of borrow-
ing and controlled its orientation independently of internal cleavages and
social stakes. The process is quite obviously completed with pressure from
the international environment that controls alliances and prompts inde-
pendence movements to find in the left, even the extreme left, concepts on
which they can structure their discourse and practice. The search—often
forced—for Soviet support was, from this point of view, the deciding factor.
It often activated curious overcompensations in the dynamic of borrowing,
as in the case of Rhodesia, when Robert Mugabe’s ZANU had to use the
Chinese model to remain competitive with its rival the ZAPU of Josué
Nkomo, who was receiving Russian aid. The essentially ethnic distinction
separating the two movements, the first being mainly Shona and the sec-
ond more rooted in the Ndebele of the south, was thus reconstructed in
terms of superimposed antagonisms among persons and factions, as well as
borrowed references and disruptive importations.

This same paradox of rupture activating borrowings is also found in the
history of the Tunisian independence movement, when Habib Bourguiba
reformed the Destour, to give rise to a more exigent and urgently national-
istic Neo-Destour. Moreover, this renewed party mobilized a new elite, dis-
tinguished by the Western, secular education of the Sadigiyya, whose
graduates constituted an opposition against tradition. Many had com-
pleted judicial studies in French universities, where they read Western law
and frequented socialist militants and leaders who thus exerted their influ-
ence on the new Tunisian party.°

A logic that combines rupture of meaning and imitation brings dysfunc-
tion in its wake. Once in power, thanks to independence, the parties try to
prolong their identity, linked essentially to the struggle against foreign in-
fluence, all the while maintaining a discourse and employing practices in-
spired largely by foreign models. The risks of political alienation and de-

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 135

tachment of the victorious party from the population are markedly in-
creased. The ZANU in Zimbabwe provides a significant example: with in-
dependence attained, the logic of rupture that sustained it lost all meaning
and became a mere instrument of the small elite in power. The efforts to
mobilize, following the first legislative campaign in the spring of 1985, led
to superficial success. Though official reports put voter participation at 97
percent and records a turnout of 98 percent for Mashonaland-the area
populated by the dominant ethnic group-it is known that villagers walked
out of electoral meetings and that, as a result, the party’s local sections re-
sorted more and more to physical and moral force, with violence not ex-
cluded. In short, the first steps toward an electoral process favored the pro-
gressive development of a single party system.

In this light, the functional mutation of the Marxist-Leninist-inspired
language used by the ZANU merits particular attention. Initially it marked
a break with the colonial order, and then progressively evolved into a way
to obscure ideologically an economic policy that was, in fact, neoliberal
and expressive of the new dependence relations weighing on the former
Rhodesia. Faced with a white economic power that had not abdicated, the
reproduction of a Marxist-Leninist ideology and a foreign policy favorable
to the Eastern Bloc remained the only source of legitimacy for the group in
power and the only sign of its political continuity.

The same holds true for most of the parties that built their socialist iden-
tity in the struggle for independence. The progressive conversion of this
reference into a vague ideological discourse unable to represent the nation
deeply separated these parties from the population, thus fueling the for-
mation of fundamentalist and particularlist groups. The success of the Is-
lamic Salvation Movement in Algeria occurred on the remains of the NLF,
which could only continue to articulate a socialist ideology unrelated to Al-
gerian culture and belied by increasing privatization and overtures to the
IMF. The strong mobilizing capacity of independent sects and churches in
sub-Saharan Africa reflects this same logic of particularist attraction in the
face of parties using outmoded, ineffective political formulas. This dis-
equilibrium delivered hundreds of thousands of members to Ivory Coast’s
Harrist church, Zambia’s Lumpa church, West Africa’s Aladura churches,
and also to the Marabout brotherhoods in Senegal and the Maitatsine sect,
which in 1984 terrorized the northern Nigerian state of Gongola.°

These movements, however, should not be analyzed as organizations of
substitution. Refusing to be transformed into political parties, playing in-
stead the card of denunciation and delegitimization of such parties, these

136 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

movements find their strength in references to authenticity and particular-
ism. In that, they are protesters against the political scene, calling for a way
out of the political and entail, in the words of Christian Coulon, a “revenge
of African societies,” seeking not to take political power but rather to give
rise to a countersociety. In these conditions a vicious circle quickly ap-
peared. Having lost their mobilizing faculty, political parties did nothing
more than support functional rivalries among the elite groups in power;
they thus fueled protest—of which they were the victims—by particularist
social movements calling for the end of politics and the construction of
countersocieties that, in turn, weakened the mobilizing capacities of the
traditional parties. As a result, the collapse of partisan resources, which at
the dawn of independence were the pride of the new political classes, made
these political classes increasingly greater tributaries of foreign support. It
is not the least of paradoxes that these parties of rupture became, by their
growing inability to renew and adapt, a cause—indirect but particularly
strong—of the deepening relations of dependence.

As instruments of rupture, the parties in the developing countries tried
nevertheless to fulfill a function of political communication designed to
link the governed and governing. This fact, of course, commonly occurs in
partisanship within all political systems. It is nevertheless quite a different
matter when such communication takes place outside a competitive usage
of universal suffrage and in a context where community solidarities and the
multiplicity of social networks take over the basic tasks of communication.
In such cases, the chances of establishing a common language between the
partisan stratum and the public are reduced even further because the use-
fulness of such communication is infinitely less apparent than it is in a com-
petitive system: for the public, the use of traditional social networks of
clientelism and kinship relations is much more effective; for the party, the
effort of articulating and transmitting requests is more haphazard because
they are not formulated publicly, and the absence of partisan competition
makes it useless to take charge of the population’s expectations, since no
immediate advantage is to be obtained. On the contrary, all developmen-
talist ideological orientations incite the party to operate in an authoritar-
ian manner and to undertake, from top to bottom, the function of political
education that, by definition, refuses to concede anything at the local level.
In this scenario, the centralized model borrowed from the West of parties
representing large masses tends to become corrupt and radicalized: cen-
tralization is only stronger because political education and support for the

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 137

elite groups in power are activities preferred over electoral mobilization
and combined demands.

The parties concerned face a contradiction. The movement toward cen-
tralization tends little by little to seriously affect the patronage capacity of
partisan organizations closely dependent on autonomy at the local level.
This phenomenon has been observed in situations as diverse as in Turkey in
the 1970s and in Zambia when, in 1972, the UNIP (United Independence
Party) became the only party.’ Thwarting this tendency thus becomes a ma-
jor and quite logical concern of the leaders, who nevertheless find it very
difficult to effect a real decentralization that risks annoying the intermedi-
ate partisan elites and causing them to block innovation. The impossible re-
forms of which many were victim, among them Nasser’s USA, Houphouét-
Boigny’s PDCI (Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast), and Sekou Touré’s
PDG (Democratic Party of Guinea) clearly reveal the negative effects of a
grafted partisan logic. These three examples show in effect that to reinvig-
orate local partisan echelons, the party leadership had to either give way to
the traditional authorities that escaped their control (as in Egypt or the
Ivory Coast), or make themselves into small cells that divested an entire
new political class attached to the privileges conferred upon it by the devel-
opmentalist logic of partisan and administrative bureaucracies (as occurred
in Guinea).

This weak mobilizing capacity had, among other effects, that of turning
the political parties in the developing countries a little more toward the ex-
terior and thus the international scene. Their precarious rootedness in the
society, and their strong implication in governmental political action, made
them often even more sensitive to international stakes: in its capacity as a
supporter of demands from the society, the party tends to become an organ
of diplomatic and international communication. Thus Nasser’s creation of
the Arab Socialist Union in 1962 had the principal effect of conveying to
other countries the pro-Soviet reorientation of Egyptian diplomacy; the
transformation of the Neo-Destour into the Destour Socialist Party allowed
Bourguiba to proclaim the radicalization of his socialist options, which
themselves marked the end point of Tunisia’s break with France and its
search for new international patrons.

Thus involved with the international scene and rather largely extro-
verted, the parties feel the effects of their inability to act within the devel-
oping political systems and have a natural inclination to reintegrate,
through the international order, into a space more in conformity with their
origin. At the same time, this shift makes them at least partial vectors of in-

138 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

ternational ideological and political inflows, and as a result, instruments of
dependence.

Because of this very fact, the institutional role of political parties lags con-
siderably behind what it would be in a competitive situation. Political par-
ties in the West were created to organize universal suffrage and were very
quickly associated in their history with control by pluralist regimes, to the
point even of becoming one with the way a democracy functions. But in a
noncompetitive system, they undergo an inversion that can produce quite
unexpected results. First, protest has value for the single party whose func-
tions weaken with time, since its specificity with respect to the state fades.
Faced with a lessened need for political communication, this type of orga-
nization progressively loses everything that signified its originality within
political-administrative institutions and finds itself relegated to accessory
functions. The evolution of Algeria’s NLF is, in this light, notable: as the
period of independence receded in time, all the movement retained from
its partisan identity was a symbolic and weak hold on the cultural orienta-
tion of Algerian society. Because of the party’s status as a nonfunctioning
unit, the new political elite had good reason to spurn it in favor of pursuing
more prestigious and lucrative careers in other state institutions. These
other state institutions were powerful, not just in appearance but in fact,
which allowed the new generation of young Algerian technocrats to realize
their professional abilities and to increase contacts and travels abroad in or-
der to fully benefit from the symbolic recognition that accompanies the ex-
ercise of power. Thus the NLF was successively supplanted by the army and
then by the new state technocracy, quickly losing the reputation of “parti-
san monocratism” it had acquired at the end of the war of liberation.®
Gradually abandoning its governing function, the single party becomes
most often involved in a functional deficit that relegates it to a merely sub-
ordinate role, further alienating it politically from society. As an interme-
diate site beneath state power, it could in the past claim to exercise a pa-
tronage function that, as we have seen, tended to progressively disappear,
leaving it only a regulatory role in factional disputes. Being geographically
diverse and, because of its militancy, retaining a large number of agents, it
could also complement the state bureaucracy at various regional and local
levels in order to provide services for a small intermediate elite. The
150,000 members of the Syrian Ba’ath party, for example, play a genuine
role in local administration; the PRI (Islamic Party of the Republic) effec-
tively managed to coordinate religious leaders and local revolutionary or-

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 139

ganizations in Iran during the 1980s.’ These new functions constitute po-
litical inventions, but their performance is precisely contained and limited
by the extraneousness of the partisan product: the NLF and Ba’ath are per-
ceived as collective intermediary organizations, just as are the local eche-
lons of single African parties to which the village chiefs are always pre-
ferred; as for the lranian PRI, it was so ineffective that in 1987 Khomeini
ordered it to cease activity.

In the context of an open multiparty system, the ability to function
leads, in most cases, to inversions no less remarkable; the avowed compe-
tition between parties, in fact, reinvigorates traditional forms of authori-
tarian government. Morocco’s monarchy had thus encouraged in 1959 the
creation of the Democratic Party of Independence and the reconstitution
of the People’s Agrarian Movement in order to make all-powerful the Is-
tiqlal Party, which held power in the palace. In Iran of the 1960s, the shah
institutionalized the factional struggle by encouraging bipartisan opposi-
tion of the Melli Party and the Mardom Party in such a way as to play one
against the other and consolidate his own autocracy, just as Sadat was able
to bring about a controlled multiparty system sufficiently manifest to legit-
imate the dominant party and sufficiently restrained not to endanger it. In
each of these cases, the importation of the pluralist model generated func-
tional accomplishments that completely contradicted the original charac-
teristics of the imported product, consolidating authoritarianism rather
than dismantling it, making the party an instrument, not to spread politi-
cal power but, on the contrary, to increase its concentration.

Here, probably, lies one of the major causes of the weak performance,
even the illusory nature, of most parties in developing countries: their
functional decline not only distances the social actors from society and en-
closes them in an official and artificial political arena but also causes the
population to perceive them as extraneous, belonging to a symbolic and
human world disconnected from social reality. Of course, the party is not
because of that isolated from sociopolitical traditions and can even try to
use them to its profit, notably by incorporating the logic of patronage and
nepotism: the UNIP in Zambia took over the work of clientelism for farm-
ers asking for credit; within the same party, the Bemba and Ila-Tonga fac-
tions used their own distribution networks to provide employment or vari-
ous types of authorizations. However, the phenomenon began to fade as
the UNIP became more of an institution and a single party, partaking of a
more state-like and neopatrimonial logic of power.'° Factionalism and pa-
tronage were thus transformed into instruments of a centralizing practice

I40 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

that led the holder of supreme power to place those loyal to him at the head
of the party, which happened with President Kaunda and his entourage,
graduates of the Sahel in Bourguiba’s PSD, the Malinke in Sekou Toure’s
PDG, the Takriti in Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath, or even Gandhi's family in
India’s Congress (I) Party.

The partisan dynamic thus combines the effects of a vigorous impor-
tation leading to a rapid conversion of its functions with a strong control by
executives, which drastically limits its autonomy within the social system.
This makeup is increasingly dysfunctional: the control of the parties—most
often single parties—by the central power reduces the possibilities society
could have to reappropriate the party, thus often accelerating the move
away from partisanship and toward associative, religious, or ethnic move-
ments. At the same time, the insertion of parties into the official political
system weakens their performance, reduces their autonomy relative to
politico-administrative institutions, and reveals the unfavorable nature of
importation just as does the disparity between functions fulfilled by Western
political parties and the sociopolitical realities of non-Western countries.

Efforts at symbolic correction, the organization of elections offering no
real choices, which we know are not merely—or principally—staged, change
nothing; that is, they change nothing of the close connection within the
very logic of partisanship between importation and loss of political capa-
bilities and, because of this, between importation and dependence. It is re-
markable, moreover, that this relation is essentially negative: dependence
is created, in this particular case, not so much out of imitation itself as from
the destructive consequences that imitation tends to have on the political
order of non-Western societies. The “liberal” parties that exist pretty much
everywhere outside the West, notably in the conservative regimes of the
Muslim world, have not successfully instilled their ideology in the diverse
levels of the population, no more than Marxist-inspired parties could in the
former South Yemen, Angola, or South Africa. From this point of view, the
clear result belongs more to a “de-ideologizing” and thus to a regression of
partisan identifications than to a universalization of Western political dis-
course: the Ba’ath in the Arab world, parties based on African socialism,
and the Congress Party produce and express a discourse whose outlines are
more and more blurred and less and less in conformity with the ideology of
origin learned in Western schools.

In politics the administration seems to be another component, also im-
ported, but in a form superior to political parties. The resources of power

IMPORTED PRODUCTS I41

available to it are incontestably better, for at least two essential reasons: fi-
nancial support of developing countries comes principally from abroad,
aside from choices made by the deliberative powers, which are most often
negotiated by the upper bureaucratic echelons; and the advantage avail-
able to the bureaucracy leads society to, at least partially and tactically,
align with the bureaucracy, thereby initiating a reciprocal adaptation that
is probably more effective than what occurs with the parties.

Yet the logic of imitation finds nourishment here. Few concepts have
been so extensively identified with the idea of a universal and abstract ra-
tionality as that of bureaucracy. To introduce roles deriving from it into a
society dominated by development constitutes both a particularly fruitful
means of self-legitimation and a consistent way to gain the upper hand rel-
ative to traditional authorities. In its Western, Weberian, rational-legal
version, bureaucracy offers gratifying and secure positions of employment;
it also constitutes a valuable way to conserve power and acquire its advan-
tages. Not surprisingly in these conditions, bureaucracies originating in
France were among the first goods imported by the Ottoman sultan at the
beginning of the Tanzimat period, and the Saint-Simonian and Comtian
ideologies and the very idea of technocracy infiltrated very early not only
Turkey but also the Middle East, Egypt, and Persia. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, India began its first recruiting competitions of high
functionaries, which later became a model for Britain when it wanted to ap-
ply the Northcote-Trevelyan report (1854) and sought to create a struc-
tured civil service." It is equally understandable that in the Asia and Africa
of today the bureaucracy is perceived by the princes either as a means to
link the new, educated generations with their own concept of an imported
modernity or as a leading, even obligatory, career for those receiving
higher education. This logic led Gambia, for example, to double the num-
ber of its civil servants from 1974 to 1984; however, bureaucratic increases
and the resulting dysfunctions are increasingly felt pretty much everywhere
in the developing world.” It was also through bureaucratic development
shored up by a strong scientific ideology borrowed from the West that
Mustafa Kemal built his own support and acquired a powerful clientele
made up of both a state elite and a national bourgeoisie composed of entre-
preneurs brought into state capitalism and largely sustained by the public
bureaucracy.

It is tempting to formulate the same hypothesis for the African coun-
tries that have recently achieved independence and reproduced an admin-
istrative model inspired largely by their former colonizers. It is particularly

142 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

obvious in those former French colonies which, during colonization, be-
came imbued with the former, paradigmatic bureaucratic tradition, which
was generously supported by the studies and training the new national elite
received in France. Yet several recent studies, notably that of Dominique
Darbon, recommend caution: the former colonial administration in no way
resembles the Jacobin type of bureaucratic model, since in fact, the new
African states inherited an administrative model largely improvised by the
colonizers according to the circumstances of conquest, of the management
of daily life, and the maintenance of order; moreover, if the structures are
imitated, the conceptions and visions cultivated by the agents remain
largely differentiated from the Weberian model and, as a result, derive not
only from an original bureaucratic culture but also from a particular artic-
ulation of the administrative model adapted by the receiving society.”

Importation remains decisive, however, at least from two perspectives.
Let us look first of all at the structural aspect. Whatever their political or
ideological orientation, the African states have taken, principally from
France, the naming of ministries, their organization, the delegation of du-
ties, and administrative management. More significantly, the same princi-
ple of territorial organization has occurred, even including partitions dat-
ing from colonization where only the names of districts or departments
have changed: communities themselves as basic units have been ignored,
in spite of the decisive importance of their social role, in favor of a territo-
riality that seems to date from the Napoleonic era. And the height of para-
dox, the major innovation attempted since independence is a decentraliza-
tion that differs from the colonial administrative model, that extends
well-intentioned political choices (as in Mauritania with the law of July
1986 that initiated local democracy) but which in fact most often adopts
modes of decentralization in vogue in the West, such as they are the most
actively promulgated by experts in development and by IMF technicians.“
Community groups are thus immediately assimilated into the local collec-
tivities, losing their own character and being overshadowed by the more
visible local echelons associated with preservation of the essential prerog-
atives held by the center. Just as in the North, the center loses nothing, as
can be seen, for example, in the practical results of decentralization poli-
cies undertaken in Tanzania."

In addition, the rules of functioning remain the other certain value of
importation. African administrative laws are no different from the French
model, either conceptually or technically. Public administration remains
subordinate to the same rules, just as the population’s access to public bu-

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 143

reaucracies does. Even if the written law differs in certain stipulations from
French law, even if it is not—far from it—the sole normative basis of the ad-
ministration or those regulated by it, and even if it differs from the “practi-
cal law” of Etienne Le Roy," the Romanist syntax dominates, remaining
the only legitimate reference for the African states, that is, the only possi-
ble way to conceive and organize change. Not surprisingly, in these condi-
tions all administrative reform, even the most vigorous, quickly reconnects
with the constitutive elements of the same imported model, thus depriving
the state of all possibility genuinely to transform the administrative order,
as is suggested, for example, by the well-known fate of the “local revolu-
tionary powers” that Sekou Toure had tried to install in Guinea at the be-
ginning of the 1980s in order to promote participation by the people: in-
serted in the normative and institutional cadre of a Jacobin-inspired state
and administrative model, the initiative was ruined by active resistance on
the part of intermediate administrative echelons, who had reproduced a
prefectorial type of territorial organization.

In reality, imported administrative institutions present the paradox of
combining a powerful conservatism in terms of structure with a need for
adaptation to social interaction. The contradiction is, however, only an ap-
parent one: both of these characteristics derive jointly from power re-
sources that benefit the public bureaucracy in societies characterized by the
absence of partisan competition, by effective and well-anchored patrimo-
nial practices profiting civil servants, and by the extroversion of political-
administrative activities that offer the best perquisites to those in contact
with the exterior.” This rich endowment benefiting the bureaucracy—which
can, moreover, and for the same reasons, be both abundant and parasitical
of entire sectors of the society—triggers its efforts to adapt to and insert it-
self into social life. Yet the limits of social life appear already: the impossi-
ble reform from which this type of bureaucracy suffers, the “iron law” that
seems to confine it in an imported syntax, enunciating in advance the rules
by which its institutional structures are transformed, relegating the dy-
namics of reappropriation to either the margins of the system or solidly out-
side its institutional framework, at the risk of engendering a completely
dysfunctional dualism.

In fact, the essential element of reciprocal adaptation has to do with the
composition of the actors’ micro-strategies: while seeking to preserve the
rigidity of the imported institutional frame, the bureaucracy needs to pen-
etrate the local society, in order to affect those administered, and detach it
from traditional authorities; while valorizing itself by having its own rules

144 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

shape the rational-legal administration, it needs to safeguard the frame-
work of its own culture and bring that culture within its own sphere; and at
the same time, while resisting an institutional model that is profoundly
alien to them, the administered individuals need the bureaucracy’s ser-
vices and resources, which are often indispensable.”

Numerous means of rapprochement derive from this timely conjunction
of shared interests, whose utilitarian nature creates ambiguity throughout
a frequently dysfunctional process. The privatization of the administration
appears to be the current result of adaptation. A clear means of reconciling
the agent’s administrative position and his communitarian culture, an easy
intermediary to affect a local society foreign to bureaucratic culture, pri-
vatization is also activated at the request of the user, who, aware that he re-
quests a rare resource, quickly discovers the advantage of vertical solidari-
ties from which he can obtain maximum benefits personally and for himself
alone.'? However, moralizing about corruption in order to condemn it is,
sociologically, just as debatable as discreetly recognizing it in order to es-
tablish a “functional dysfunction.””° In reality, the privatization of the bu-
reaucracy reveals first of all an irresolvable tension between public and pri-
vate in a sociohistorical and cultural context that impugns it; it reveals the
incapacity of both the center and the periphery to communicate, since they
can do nothing but contradict each other and reject the constraints of the
rules and procedures governing their interactions. In short, the universal-
ist and individualist center must, in order to function, become particular-
ist and communitarian, and thus negate itself and, especially, radicalize all
neopatrimonial orientation, which was, as we have seen, one of the surest
foundations of dependence. From this double point of view, the corruption
in the South differs from that found in the North: though initially an indi-
vidual practice, it becomes systematic; though initially useful purely inter-
nally, it becomes useful to the exterior as well.

Even so, privatization and corruption do not dominate the adaptation
process: the convergences between the social dynamics from below and ad-
ministrative initiatives are numerous, especially when the latter are redis-
tributive and thus reinterpreted as a function of codes proper to the local
society. The strong hypothesis developed by Hyden of a “captured” peas-
antry, torn from its communitarian autonomy by the administration’s vol-
untarist activity, is in part exaggerated, since the Tanzanian peasant finds,
as Denis Martin has shown, obvious advantages in the active presence of
the state.”

However, such logic has its pitfalls: rather than create a durable, insti-

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 145

tutionalized relation of allegiance among citizens, this exchange of inter-
ests supposes an entire group of evasion and avoidance strategies by the ad-
ministration when the latter’s actions meet neither the needs nor expecta-
tions of the local communities. After Zimbabwe had won its independence,
it found a genuine success in its efforts to build an entire network of agri-
cultural cooperatives from the bottom up. On the other hand, the state’s ef-
forts in 1986 to control the cooperatives by creating a Ministry of Coopera-
tives ended in failure. In fact, the village communities produced their own
“clandestine self-administration,” to use the apt expression of Ernest Gell-
ner—that, for essential matters, negotiates with the central administration
or its representatives for the conditions of its participation in public poli-
cies. Whether it concern mutual aid, child protection, health cooperatives,
or even credit, the village creates such strong and active participatory struc-
tures that the administration has no other choice than to endorse whatever
has been decided in the lower ranks.”” Sub-Saharan Africa is a veritable
laboratory where one can observe and analyze this process as well as the re-
sulting frustrations it occasionally provokes in a population poorly adapted
to the work of recuperation; yet the phenomenon is found elsewhere, no-
tably in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt.”°

The articulation is as current as it is perilous: though sometimes prof-
itable in the short term as a useful way to effect certain decisions in the lo-
cal society, it has the double effect of altering the administrative act and es-
pecially of perpetually exposing it to the risk of having no effect when the
communities opt for avoidance measures. Henceforth the gap deepens be-
tween the theory of a universalist bureaucratic state and the practice of a
systematically particularist mediation. In theory, the resulting negative ef-
fects could only further relativize the Weberian concept of bureaucracy,
further enclosing the imported model of the state within communitarian
categories that negate its universalist claim. In practice, however, this
setup accelerates the neopatrimonial decline that already appears in the
process of privatizing the administration. It drives the bureaucracy even
deeper into the conflict between the universal and the particularist,”* but it
especially locks the states involved in this identity into the role of “limping
Leviathan,” an expression of the growing distance between its voiced
claims and its real effectiveness. The ambiguous dialogue between a pre-
sumptuous state and a fragmented society, negotiating case by case the
conditions of its openness to public action, legitimates the doubling of aid
policies, which come, on the one hand, from the Northern states to sup-
port public administrations and, on the other, from the ONG to shore up

146 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

local communities. In reality, the hypothesis of a reappropriation of the im-
ported bureaucracy is limited in two ways: principally in the dangerous
blockage preventing central political and administrative structures from
changing in order to integrate the particular conditions of articulation into
the local society; and also in the resulting obligation for the public actor to
play the card of doubling, to accept the diminution of his political abilities,
and to thus find himself in a situation that reinforces the conditions of his
dependence relative to the exterior.

Imported Law

What is true for politics—partisan or administrative—is even more so in law.
Several factors reveal that processes of appropriation and adaptation are at
work here more than elsewhere, and to such an extent as to produce more
dysfunction. The rule of law belongs first of all to a domain where formal-
ization takes on a very particular operative importance: a written law or
procedure reflects not only a system of values but also a more or less per-
formative technical design that derives from a history and a culture. Thus
the importation of Western law into the Ottoman empire can be largely ex-
plained by formal considerations, in that the jurists of the Sublime Gate
found it difficult to be without a codified Muslim common law when faced
with special codified laws imposed by international pressure in accordance
with commercial or maritime law.”° This technical imperative gave rise to
a debate that led them first to codify traditional law, contained in the six-
teen-volume Medjelle and published at the urging of Djevdet Pasha be-
tween 1870 and 1877. In itself, this production was a typical case of dys-
functional importation: as the first legal code produced by a Muslim state,
the Medjelle devoted its introduction to a new juridical method, which, in
effect, came from the West and enjoyed an aura of modernity in the minds
of the elite. At the same time, the project quickly failed, since the Medjelle
constituted merely a collection of an impressive number of specific solu-
tions, in conformity with the method proper to Muslim law, which is in
essence jurisprudential. Since it was neither very adaptable nor useful, the
Medjelle rapidly sparked intense criticism, which led jurists to abandon it
and intensified the arguments of those who favored replacing it entirely
with the Napoleonic Civil Code. Here the formal imperative became the
basic reason for the passage from one juridical culture to another.

The same steps occurred in the transformations of Indian law. With the
Charter Act in 1833, India opened itself to codification, principally at the

IMPORTED PRODUCTS I47

initiative of Lord Macaulay, an admirer of Bentham and partisan of a juridi-
cal method whose practical advantages were obvious: the decree of laws fa-
vorable to the unification of a country where the fragmentation of tradi-
tional law increased political segmentation. The legislative work begun in
1859 thus led to the elaboration of a code of civil procedure, a penal code,
and a code of penal procedure, as well as numerous specialized legislative
dispositions. Modern Indian law was henceforth dominated by British ju-
ridical culture without being deprived of French Napoleonic influence
(even if only in the notion of code) and even some elements of the Louisiana
penal code.”® Independence changed nothing of this borrowing. The newly
constituted state, exposed directly to the dangers of centrifugal dynamics,
needed urgently to confirm, which it did through Article 372 of its Consti-
tution of 1950, the unifying work of codification, of which it was infinitely
more sure than it was of traditional communitarian law. The result, how-
ever, was a source of tensions and complexities: from then on official Indian
law tended to coexist with more specific laws, Hindu and Muslim, organiz-
ing social relations, notably personal ones, at the microcommunitarian
level. This breaking up and doubling were matters of even greater concern
because they reflected and confirmed the critical distance separating a sec-
ular westernized state from a society deeply marked by the communitarian
order. This situation has evolved, moreover, toward a more dysfunctional
reality: claiming, in accordance with the Western model, to create a unified
law and to monopolize political functions, the state has intervened more
and more actively in Hindu laws pertaining to the individual. It has in effect
taken over that area of law legislatively, has imposed it on the Sikhs, and has
subsequently westernized it in order to suppress castes (art. 15 of the Con-
stitution), reform marriage and divorce laws (Hindu Marriage Act, 1955),
reform the nature of minority status and that of tutelage (1956), alimony
and inheritance (1956), and even land ownership regulations. The process
began to affect Muslim law, notably through initiatives undertaken by the
tribunals regarding divorce. These practices have fueled community ten-
sions and, in fact, supported the return and maintenance of a purely tradi-
tional and social normative system that escapes the center and organizes
the reality of social behavior that the state has been asked to recognize. This
“law of practice” confirms its significance to the extent that the state tries
to unify law: the vicious circle is thus fearsome, for it maintains a logic of
dissociation more than innovation.

A somewhat similar experience occurred with common law formalized
in French sub-Saharan Africa during the time of colonization: in reality the

148 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

finished product constitutes a mixture of endogenous customs and a syntax
from Roman law; the passage from custom—ancestral norms reproduced by
tradition—to common law-—codified and written—consecrates an essentially
Western formalization and thus tips the balance away from an African nor-
mative system toward a foreign law.”’ This observation pertains particularly
well in the jurisdictional area, since the enactment of common law has,
since colonization, led to the organization of tribunals that, like the West-
ern model, act as guarantors of subjective laws, and are the exact converse
of a conception of justice focused exclusively on the reconciliation and reg-
ulation of conflicts. The unifying effect of technique and form seems thus to
outweigh, at least chronologically, the pressure exerted by rules of Western
origin, leaving little place for the mechanisms of reappropriation.

Along with the technical requirement favoring the westernization of law
appears a second factor of importation, the vigorous pressure of transna-
tional inflows. The expansion of Western law, even before it reflects politi-
cal strategies, echoes the need to organize and codify economic exchange
relations, both private and public, between non-Western societies and Eu-
ropean countries. It is in this perspective that the Ottoman empire ac-
cepted Western law by adopting first of all, and very early, the French Code
of Commerce (1850), then the Commercial Procedure Code (1860) and
Maritime Law (1864), also from France. A comparable process occurred in
Persia: in the second half of the nineteenth century demand abroad sup-
ported the rise of cotton and silk commerce as well as that of opium, which
European societies quickly became interested in. The Greek company
Koussi and Theophilatkos, for example, monopolized olive production in
Gilan and set up a processing refinery there. Jute and tea production devel-
oped the same way, as did tobacco, the monopoly on which fell to a British
company. This dynamic rapidly led to the private appropriation of land un-
til then held basically by the shah, who was thereby able to pay his debts. It
led directly to the adoption of a law of obligations and a commercial law,
both borrowed from France and still in force under the Islamic Republic. By
1880 numerous Iranian commercial and financial concerns had been cre-
ated, following the Western model, from the Ispahan Opium Company,
which grew rich exporting its product to London and Hong Kong, to the
Société générale of Iran, which around the turn of the century maintained
seventeen exchange bureaus in Teheran. From the beginning of this
process, merchants in each city asked for the right to organize themselves
into chambers of commerce, meeting with the combined resistance of the
shah, the governors, and the clergy. By requiring their release from all these

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 149

overseers, they hastened the regulating of their profession along the lines
of Western economic literature (notably the work of Jean Sismondi, * trans-
lated into Persian in 1879) and practices long in use in European cities.”

In China, the rgrz revolution and especially the Nanking regime began
the same process that led progressively to the adoption of several codes
based on Roman law: the civil and commercial code between 1929 and 1931,
the code of civil procedure in 1932, and the property code in 1930, still ap-
plied in Taiwan today. There too, the events are not innocent: the Nanking
period effectively introduced the Chinese government to the world of busi-
ness and external economic inflows. Its civil servants were educated abroad,
while its primary support, the Shanghai business bourgeoisie, was directly
exposed to influences from the large foreign companies there. At the same
time, the state profited from financial capitalism at work: giving huge tax
exemptions in exchange for political and material support, it compromised
itself widely by westernizing its economic and social institutions to such an
extent that these institutions become the keystone of a veritable patrimoni-
alization of the society and the political system. Personal bonds grew be-
tween state capitalism, such as those uniting Chiang Kai-shek with the
Soong bank headed by his own brother-in-law, himself a Harvard graduate.
In fact, rarely has the importation of a model of foreign law been such a
source of dependence and neopatrimonialization. Nowhere, perhaps, have
both of these two logics been so clearly associated in the construction of
such a quickly established juridical mimetism. One of the first acts of the
People’s Republic of China was to abolish the borrowed codes, an act made
easier by the fact that the codes they sought to abolish were almost carica-
tures of their original models, strongly utilitarian and thus very elitist with
very little effect on the social fabric. Here, the difference from India is clear:
the fact that the Western principle of legality had so bluntly and superfi-
cially penetrated India, as well as the subsequent failure of the Soviet model,
led the Chinese to abandon a juridical culture favoring the Maoism of the
1960s and its accompanying totalitarian rhetoric. Everything happened as
if this failure to import Western law gave free rein to Confucian education
and persuasion, which took the place of law and procedure.”

The contrast is just as strong when one compares the experience of
China to that of Japan, since the Meiji era began a westernization of law
that has proved durable and much more solid. Beginning in 1874, the trans-

*Translator’s Note: Jean Sismondi (1773-1842), Swiss historian and economist. He
rejected the views of Adam Smith and supported state intervention to protect the
working class.

I50 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

lation of French codes supplanted Japanese juridical culture so much that
new words were created to assign foreign concepts to categories proper to
traditional juridical thought. At the end of the century, the empire was also
endowed with a French-inspired penal code (1882), a code of civil proce-
dure influenced by Germany (1890), a code of commerce (1899), and espe-
cially a civil code (1898) containing both models. The social use of this law
has long remained limited, very weakly adapted, notably in its individualist
nature, to the cultural realities of Japanese society. The recourse to tri-
bunals and judicial procedures remains modest, notably in the area of civil
responsibility, whereas the poorly valued profession of jurist attracts few
individuals. These are so many elements that make a hundred-year-old im-
portation and, it seems, a durable one into a real source of alienation be-
tween society and its institutions, though it connects the latter to the in-
ternational economic community.*°
This gap promotes dysfunctions that numerous studies of Japan have elu-
cidated. Thus capitalism was established, notably with the help of the west-
ernization of law, without which the categories of juridical individualism do
not penetrate into society and provide a counterbalance. Its constructions
thus came about along with the maintenance of a “fusional communitari-
anism” that—the height of paradox—has been adopted by entrepreneurs and
politicians alike. The former found a way to limit conflicts in their busi-
nesses and progress in a social legislation that could have been in a direct
line with the importation of law. The latter refer to it actively in the most di-
verse ways, fluctuating with varying conditions, but in each case selectively
restraining the reach of certain constitutional principles borrowed from
Western political systems. It is in the name of “fusional communitarian-
ism” that the traditionalist school of Japanese constitutional law grew, serv-
ing as it did in large part as a juridical foundation of authoritarianism at the
end of the period between World War I and World War II.*" Thus the profes-
sor of law Uesugi Shinkichi (1878-1929) could bridge the gap between com-
munitarianism and state, which led to an exacerbated ultranationalism that
presented humanity as the “desire for order and cooperation” and the
state’s reason for being as “the unity of natural fact and spiritual opera-
tion.”** The success of ultranationalism was considerably supported by an
active combination of a lively traditional Confucianism that an elitist im-
portation could in no way disturb and Western juridical and political cate-
gories of thought. The synthesis was as complex as it was clever: Nakono
Seigo, founder in 1933 of the Tohokai Party, appeared on the scene at the
same time as Hitler and the return to the Japanese community;** in 1940 Fu-

IMPORTED PRODUCTS I51

jisawa Chikao claimed, for his part, that Hitler had been influenced by Con-
fucianism.** Without reaching such an extreme, the ideas of nation and na-
tionalism appeared in Japan as new categories of thought, fruits of this cul-
tural synthesis, as is revealed in the evolution of kokka, the contemporary
term for the nation.* In today’s Japan, the process of hybridization sustains
the same strategic designs: beyond a nationalism that no longer attains the
same heights, the succeeding liberal-democratic governments draw from
the same register, making “fusional communitarianism” a counterbalance
helpful to the needs of pluralism. Maintaining a consensualist ideology
helps depoliticize society, fuels the crisis of party representation and the
rise of social movements from outside the system and often just as violent.
In the perspective of a politically maintained communitarianism, neigh-
borhood movements ( jumin-undo) prevail over business unionism, thus re-
vealing the benefits available for the actors from a selective implantation of
the principles of juridical individualism. However, aside from the resulting
limits in participation, the practice of hybridization helps to no small extent
to explain the increase of violence against the state, of which the Sanrizuka
movement, created to halt the construction of a new airport in Tokyo, is the
best illustration. Remarkably, this movement was organized specifically on
a communitarian basis, allying local communities and sects, and protesting
as a group against the state’s legitimacy and its institutional configuration
as well as against the rise of an industrial capitalism that endangered agri-
culture and, through that, ancestral lands. As David Apter has convincingly
shown, the collision between the state and communitarian logic has gener-
ated a dangerous dialectic, “violence becoming legitimate and legitimacy
violent.”*° As constitutive of dependence, the gap created by the mecha-
nisms of importation between a state having Western law and a society
based essentially on its own traditional values also produces tensions and
crises all the more fearsome and violent for being part of a system that by
definition no longer allows any common ground between state and society.

In the name of an endogenous legitimacy, communitarian groups and sects

continue the work of imported political institutions.

Technical necessities and pressure from transnational inflows are not
the only bases for the importation of Western law. The political needs of
the prince and the need for a unified national law in societies dominated by
a particularist normative system draw a society to borrow foreign codes en-
dowed with the double legitimacy of modernity and unity. On this basis new
African regimes have repudiated the order of custom—whose codification,
we have seen, was not often reliable—and have preferred to adopt the law of

152 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

the former colonizer. Public law has provided good practice: constitutional
mimetism contributed to the value of national structures by overvaluing
them, and thus it has dismantled a common law that promotes tribal and
communitarian structures. The establishment of a unitary and centralized
Jacobin* conception of the state helped directly to delegitimize a common
normative system that had meaning only in the context of an officially de-
centralized and pluricommunitarian society. This jacobinization of law
brings together, as Etienne Le Roy has shown, mimetism and ineffective-
ness in the different areas of administrative, territorial, budgetary, and fis-
cal reforms, in both judicial organization and laws governing nationality.
Similarly, reforms regarding the family and land ownership conform with
the French civil code, thereby individualizing social relations and dissoci-
ating land from communitarian social structures; they also assure the tri-
umph of the individual as the subject of law, establishing the status of citi-
zenship and thus guaranteeing state domination.* At the same time,
constitutional law and the administrative law deriving from it are in both
word and concept solidly European and specifically French, whereas the
experience of Japan shows that the importation of laws relative to work
does not necessarily follow.

The hoped-for result, in these conditions, was far from achieved. Being
a system of meaning derived from an entirely different culture, law is able
to penetrate and function within African societies only weakly. In the
quasi-absence of a general social law and a participatory constitutional law,
and lacking any ability to incite to action, the integration of law into indi-
vidual strategies of protection and promotion is all the more difficult. Its
principal effect is thus to transform traditional social structures into a site
of protest and defense against an institutional assembly perceived as for-
eign; these structures effect a counterlegitimacy, thereby weakening the
state, forcing it to work with them in order to make obedience effective,
and this in complete opposition to the desired goal of the importers. The
opposition between state and society thus becomes ambiguous, even to-
tally confused, relative to the categories of Western law. In the confronta-
tion of legitimacies it implies, it leads the prince to be more Western than
his Western models, which are presented as both modern and democratic,
even while he more or less discreetly incorporates the traditional formulas
of legitimation. The current growing reference to multiparty systems and

“Translator’s Note: The Jacobins were a revolutionary club (1789-94), holding
their meetings in the former monastery of the Jacobins in Paris. They later became
the chief organ of the Montagnards, who advocated a strong centralized regime.

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 153

rediscovered political pluralism goes hand in hand with a formal justifica-
tion of the one-party system practiced in the past. In both cases, there
clearly appears the same effort of legitimation by association with, in the
past, a Western, socialist, or Marxist institutional practice, and, currently,
a neoliberal practice. In reality, this process marks a turning point: it de-
fines solutions destined to consolidate a weakened political order, and at
the same time reassure the tutelary Western powers. Its effectiveness re-
mains, however, uncertain, since it attempts to save a political system that
falls victim to its own cultural dissonance through principles forged by a le-
gal system from without.

Dependence and importation can also be completely confused, since
Western law is imposed purely and simply by tutelary power. The colo-
nizer’s role in the diffusion of his own normative system is, as we have seen,
considerable, even if it is almost always associated, as in Africa or India,
with a formation and a conservation of norms originating in custom: para-
doxically, when undertaken by the national elite, as in the Ottoman or the
Japanese worlds, importation was more systematic and exclusive. The colo-
nial enterprise is thus perhaps not, for this and several other reasons, the
only or even the privileged mode of the more or less forced dissemination
of Western forms of domination. The transformations undergone by capit-
ulating practices thus play a decisive role in the transmission of Western
law to the states affected. As of 1875, a mixed tribunal system was set up in
Egypt: Egyptian magistrates were in the minority there, relative to their
European counterparts, who were predominantly French or Italian. Little
by little, the regime evolved under pressure from the European powers,
who required that judgments rendered conform to Western law. As a result,
Egypt acquired new codes that quickly extended to national tribunals. In
Lebanon, the French-Lebanese tribunals disappeared only in 1946 and pro-
duced a jurisprudence marked heavily by French influence.*®

The combination of all these importation processes created a chain re-
action marked by increasing passivity caused by the very nature of borrow-
ing. Thus, in the name of Arab legislative unity (i.e., a nationalist position),
just after its independence Syria adopted a civil code inspired directly and
explicitly by the Egyptian code, with the intermediary of French legislation.
Iraq’s trajectory is more complex, revealing a more sustained eclecticism,
exacerbated notably by the juridical influence of its protector, Britain. The
Code of Inheritance and Alimony adopted by the Iraqi parliament in 1951
combined rules from Muslim law, the Ottoman Medjelle, the Egyptian code,
and British common law. Though this mixture is found in the history of Jor-

154 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

danian law, the spread of Egyptian juridical practice has remained domi-
nant in Libya since 196r and in Kuwait since soon after independence.”

Complexity and alienation combine quite specifically to invert the for-

mulas that legitimate law in Western culture. They detach the norm from
its natural source as much as from its contractual origin: neither discov-
ered by reason nor produced by a contracting will, the rule of imported law,
hybridized and tinkered with, combining at times even rival foreign legal
systems, can offer only the political argument of necessity or the more eso-
teric one of technical superiority to counter the legitimacy of custom or
religious law. The task is all the more difficult for the importers of law be-
cause where tradition is more vital and more legitimate, political or tech-
nical opportunities confront the double obstruction of cultural incompre-
hension and utilitarian rejection. When Egyptian law stipulates that every
marriage must be notarized in order to protect the inheritance and guar-
antee the payment of alimony in case of divorce, it is immediately perceived
as constraining by the social actors, who find refuge in tradition and com-
mon-law marriage. It is thus not surprising that modern Egyptian society
is increasingly interested in common-law marriage. The same interest has
also arisen in sub-Saharan Africa regarding funerals and baptisms of chil-
dren, where children are given their fathers’ names. Even now in Egypt and
Japan, plaintiffs avoid juridical proceedings for the purposes of receiving
damages, and prefer to settle privately. Thus, in upper Egypt, private
vengeance (tha7) has increased significantly and become increasingly
practiced in towns, because of rural migration.*°

This avoidance logic reveals both the individual’s strong capacity for re-
sistance and the ambiguity of a normative order that does not realize its ob-
jectives, that gives rise to new dysfunctions and brings about the conditions
of a renewed independence. The target is almost never attained: appreci-
ated and imported primarily for its universalist virtues, Western law does
not create a genuine public space, not in Africa, the Middle East, India, or
Japan. Far from unifying behaviors, it fragments them; far from creating
the status of citizenship, it promotes the free mobility of individuals among
whichever normative spaces most suit their interests. Instead of introduc-
ing a state logic into these societies, it in fact imposes an image of civil obe-
dience that contradicts the principles of universalism.

These results are dysfunctional precisely because they try to organize the
state against itself. Either, as in Africa or the Middle East, the introduction
of a normative system accelerates the state’s exit from social spaces, thus
diminishing individual allegiances to the center; or as in India, it leads

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 155

the state to accept the public nature of the plurality of communitarian so-
cial spaces, and thus the limits to its own competence and its own univer-
salist idenuty. Henceforth, the state’s survival has to do not only with the
accommodation and bending of its own rules, which, in fact, has commonly
occurred throughout Western history, but also with a logic of avoidance
leading to the reconstruction of a legitimate political and juridical scene
elsewhere. The logic of appropriation is thus overtaken by that of doubling.
Certainly, the imported laws could, here and there, be adjusted, such as
family and land ownership rights in Africa or English law in India, but these
adaptations are probably small next to the rigidity of most of the public laws
borrowed from the West and the results of the subsequent detachment of
the public from the social order. It would be unjust to the receiving societies
to say that the construction of a center of authority within them necessarily
entails such a loss of capacity that it would ironically be fitting to praise
them for their strong appropriation capacities.

This loss is, in fact, twofold. Technically, the effects of avoidance and
doubling generate uncertainty and unpredictability, as well as the subse-
quent weakening of the center. Culturally, it is expressed as an identity cri-
sis that occurs commonly when different, superimposed juridical cultures
contribute to the formation of the norm: Jordan and Iraq were, in the space
of a half century, exposed to the influence of the Muslim law of the Med-

Jelle, of common law, and of French law transmitted through Egyptian law;
contemporary Japanese law proclaims its Western-ness and lets its jurists
consider themselves translators of a foreign text. This resembles the Ro-
man jurists who at the end of the Middle Ages met the construction of the
modern state with a rediscovery of Roman law reviewed and reconceived as
a function of the evolution of social thought, the discovery of individual-
ism, and the aggiornamento that then affected Christianity. Jurist transla-
tor and jurist builder thus stood in opposition in the definition of two dif-
ferent social functions of the producer of law; the function realized by the
former inevitably hindered the social creation of the state in order to rein-
force its extroversion.

The result is clearly oriented toward dependence. Whether it concerns
the education received by the jurists themselves or the education received
in the Western universities and hence producing networks of solidarities
rooted in the Northern world; whether it concerns the form or the content
of a rule of law or the normative mode with which non-Western societies
are integrated into international economic circuits: everything concurs in
an obvious juridical dependence. Even more profoundly, universal partici-

156 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

pation in a single legal culture leads governments to meet social crises with
solutions based on a constitutional law borrowed from the West, to thereby
increase social and cultural discord, to further distance themselves from
the people, and to integrate themselves into a juridico-political order in
which they are dependent. Such was the case, for example, with the Alge-
rian government when it reacted to the 1988 uprisings by proposing con-
stitutional reforms which they could easily claim did not contribute to in-
citing a large portion of the population to violence. Such was also the case
when President Mobutu tried unsuccessfully in September of 1991 to re-
spond to similarly intense uprisings merely by nominating a new prime
minister. This actual dependence linking the governed to a juridical cul-
ture, whose extroversion has already been proven, weakens the reactive ca-
pacity of political systems, promotes their shift toward authoritarianism,
and easily, and most perversely, supports the developmentalist argument
that, in a crisis, non-Western societies are unable to respond to requests for
reform and cannot meet demands to participate in the political process.
The history of the failure to import law is first that of material and techni-
cal dependence, and then a cultural one, based, finally, on the insidious,
acknowledged inability to use the law to enact reforms.

An Imported Debate

This dependence linking non-Western societies to a self-proclaimed uni-
versal juridical culture extends to the entire political and ideological de-
bate. Struggles for independence had placed the idea of the nation at the
center of political discourse; in order to be legitimate, this discourse had to
actively defend and make known the universal nature of nationalist cate-
gories. It was logical that the Ba’ath in the Middle East, the NLF in Algeria,
the [stiqglalin Morocco, the RDA in Africa, and the Congress Party in India
tried to use against the colonizer the hypothesis of a universal right to na-
tional sovereignty and thus to inscribe themselves in a political grammar
whose usefulness was a direct function of its nature as an imported product.
One can blame such actions for the poverty of these movements in the re-
construction politics by an endogenous culture; one can in particular note
the rapid decline of their ability to mobilize once they acquire indepen-
dence. Nationalism is unable to change from being a formula of protest re-
ceived from the colonizer into a formula of governmental mobilization, as
the subsequent experiences of the NLF, the Congress Party, and the Ba’ath
attest; recourse to the charismatic formula with Ben Bella or Nehru, or to

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 157

coercion everywhere else, reveals their inability to mobilize with endoge-
nous cultural symbols, which would have required a complete redefinition
of national communalization proper to each of these cultures, a task for
which the political personnel had neither the training nor the education.

The failure of Marxism in the Arab countries, then in India, linked no-
tably to the absence of horizontal solidarities and the socialization of indi-
viduals in terms of class, reflects the crisis of the discourse of national sov-
ereignty and polarizes the givens of political debate. This debate becomes
increasingly simplified, since it opposes a developmentalist discourse, held
by the leaders, and a culturalist discourse that emerges from various modes
of protest. The developmentalist discourse has a double function: to estab-
lish modernity as a primary requirement, justifying the possession by the
central executive power of an authority superior to all others, especially
any kind of traditional authority; and to defer or arrange the realization of
democracy, which can be attained only after a certain level of economic de-
velopment. The necessarily inflationist use of this argument leads its ben-
eficiaries to insist more and more on the universality and the high value of
the imperative to modernize, thus clearing it of the vices characterizing ex-
cessive authoritarianism. This orientation is clear in conservative monar-
chies, formerly in the shah’s discourse and now in that of the Moroccan
monarchy in its efforts to ally with the urban classes; this orientation also
covers the wide variety of revolutionary or reformist regimes: Kemalism, of
course, but also Bourguibism, the technocratic and economic planning
ideology of India’s Congress Party; and also the post-Ben Bellist Algerian
regime, for example, in its ambition to rapidly create a heavy industry and
with it to set up a national energy system.

The culturalist discourse inevitably works in the same way: aiming its
protest precisely at the source of the problem, that is, against a universalist
conception of generative modernity as well as symbolic violence and social
frustration, the reference to culture as the priority serves as an ideal foun-
dation to every tribunal undertaking. Many different Islamic movements
use this same discourse, just as do the Indian RSS and Hindu-inspired par-
tisan groups, the Japanese Komeito, and also the many increasingly suc-
cessful messianic sects that have become a substitute for fundamentalism,
both in Latin America and Africa. This discourse also tends to become
more radical: against developmentalist strategies, culturalist protest can
easily claim a legitimacy superior to that espoused by the government and
make its claim the basis of a political countersociety whose conformity to
the law assures its ascendancy over the official political scene. The consti-

158 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

tution of such a countersociety is the obvious culmination of the entire
strategy of protest: at that point, the taking of real power, such as occurred
in Iran, tends to weaken the movement’s legitimacy by forcing the move-
ment to make at least a partial compromise with developmentalist practice.
The entire culturalist discourse suggests an Islamic (or Hindu) modernity
distinct from Western modernity, but without having to enunciate the con-
tent. Aside from the fact that this passage to the concrete project implies a
partial integration into developmentalist logic, it particularly risks rup-
turing the unanimity at the basis of a culturalist-type mobilization. In that,
the FIS, the RSS, the Komeito, or Kimbanguism support, at worst, a disag-
gregation or a dulling of the political debate.

On the other hand, the confrontation of these two discourses tends to
take place in a democratic context, but in terms very strongly external to
the cultural and historical givens of the society in question. For its part, de-
velopmentalism serves as the theoretical foundation of a limited pluralism.
As a shapeless and eclectic space between totalitarianism and democracy,
this strange concept appears as the avatar of developmentalism, describing
political systems whose authoritarianism is justified by the need to rapidly
construct a modern center and to contain the rapid increase in popular par-
ticipation resulting from accelerated modernization. As a new and con-
tested power, the modernizing center has to both prove its popular legiti-
macy and moderate the effects of a political competition presented as a
dangerous luxury. Thus democracy is not negated, and even acquires a fa-
vorable position in the discourse of legitimation: at the time of its one-
party system, Algeria claimed that it was democratic; the consolidation of
a single party in Cameroon produced in 1985 the Rassemblement démocra-
tique du peuple camerounais; ruled by one of the most authoritarian re-
gimes in Africa, Guinea is controlled solely by the Parti démocratique de
Guinée équatoriale, Gabon by the Parti démocratique gabonais, the Central
African Republic by the Rassemblement démocratique centrafricain, Ivory
Coast by the PDCI, Mali by the Union démocratique du peuple malien.

As more and more present, even exclusive in the practice of protest or
opposition, culturalism takes over the democratic claim as the coherent
end point of its mobilizing capacity. Successor to the RSS, the Jana Sangh
entered the electoral fray in 1977 in the name of democracy against the dic-
tatorial tendencies it saw in Indira Gandhi; against Bourguiba, the MTI
presented itself as the principal bearer of democracy and clamored to be
recognized as a political party; in the 1987 elections, the Egyptian Islamists
wanted to appear as the democratic alternative to the controlling party.

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 159

Thus the themes of democracy and democratization contain the essen-
tial elements of political debate without even being translated into the ver-
nacular languages. Introduced as such, as the grating of two logics opposed
by everything else, political debate contains the twofold characteristic of
imported word and ambiguous problematic. Paradoxically, developmen-
talism and culturalism meet to accent the exteriority of the democratic
problematic with respect to the history of the societies in question: the first
by placing democracy in a more or less distant past, the second by rejecting
the definition of its content and keeping only the function of a unanimist
and reactive mobilization.

The paradox is burdensome, since it causes actors and observers to
think that henceforth the only model for democratization in non-Western
societies is the one forged in the West. The democratic order is thus envi-
sioned as a representative democracy with its own institutional methods
and its own philosophical underpinnings. In these conditions, the debate
over democratization in Africa and Asia quickly becomes sophistic, leading
one to evaluate—in the purest developmentalist tradition-the aptitude of
the Southern states to adopt, and achieve the same results, the democratic
regime as it was invented, over time, by Western history.

At this point, the terms of the debate become very curious. They simul-
taneously evoke the universality of the democratic model thus defined and
its multiple moorings in Western culture. Moorings or at least points of
affinity relating democracy and Christianity on at least five distinct levels:
all are characterized by a single active and participatory orientation that
differs from the contemplative or withdrawn attitudes; the democratic for-
mula of legitimacy draws deeply from the Christian distinction between the
temporal and the spiritual; Christianity and democracy share the same con-
struction of individuality, the same conception of delegation and represen-
tation, and the same vision of pluralism.*!

Such an analysis can easily find arguments to support it or, more pre-
cisely, bear it out. At its most general, however, it is just as easily refutable.
The history of Western Christianity is strewn with experiences that con-
tradict such a hypothesis and that clearly show that the correlation is a
weak and by no means necessary one. It at least appears obvious that no
single Christian culture exists, for the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and
Eastern Orthodox variants are already too profoundly different for one to
define, even intellectually, the components and foundations of this affinity.
Even within these variants, the social usage made of Christianity can be
called democratic at times and authoritarian at others, without either term

160 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

being dominant: neo-Augustinism, then traditionalism and integrism have
served as vectors in the Catholic world for authoritarian and antidemocra-
tic political ideologies, whereas Thomism seems one of the theoretical
foundations of the principle of national sovereignty; the Reformation pro-
duced as many pretotalitarian experiences, for example in the Republic of
Geneva, as democratic inventions, such as that accompanying the Puritan
revolution. Similarly, it is less than rigorous to call other cultures antide-
mocratic hastily, unless one wants to be purely polemical: Theravada Bud-
dhism promotes a conception of society founded on both the idea of equal-
ity and that of individual responsibility; the great Islamic tradition also
inspired a construction of social justice and communitarian egalitarianism
that is accepted in the modern Muslim world by all who integrate the idea
of democracy into their repertoire of political action.

In reality, behind this too-simple culturalist equation lie concealed two
particularly important intermediary considerations. On one hand, democ-
racy came about in the Western world, gradually and at different paces in
different areas, as the end point of political strategies of individual and so-
cial actors who sought either to demand their political participation or to
consolidate their own power by enlarging the participation of others: as a
conquest of power in one case, conservation in the other, the practice of
democracy consists in constructing formulas of political mobilization by
utilizing and enriching the networks of meaning contained in the sur-
rounding culture.*? On the other hand, and for this reason, the surround-
ing culture intervenes not to produce democracy, but to define its meaning
and orientation, to allow the passage from an ideal conception of democ-
racy as an aporia to the reality of a concrete and constructed regime. In
other terms, the culture has acted as a factor in Western history to invent
not democracy, but representative government.

If one transposes this double mediation onto non-Western political
scenes, one sees clearly the effects of dependence. First of all, the practice
leads to massive borrowing: the existence of democratic regimes already
functioning in the West and the socialization of non-Western political ac-
tors, which occurred mainly in political organizations or European and
North American universities, promote the immediate translation of cate-
gories of democratic action into those of a representative democratic or-
der. The first concern of the leaders of Iran’s Islamic Republic in its first
days of power was to organize a constitutional referendum followed by the
election of deputies. In most of the authoritarian regimes in Africa and
Asia, parliaments play an important role that is not just symbolic; rather

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 161

they occupy a central place in decision making and legitimation proce-
dures, no matter how weakly competitive the elections of their deputies
may be. The example of Iraq during the Gulf War reveals that, by submit-
ting each important decision to a preliminary vote in parliament, Saddam
Hussein took care not only to legitimate his action by a demonstration of
consensus, but also to send the Western societies the image of a mobiliza-
tion supported by the votes of a popular representation.

For their part, the strategies deployed by the governing and the gov-
erned tend to reinforce the logic of borrowing. Increasingly, the former
find in the discourse of democratization the means to obscure the eco-
nomic and social problems they have no way of solving. The uprisings oc-
curring in Africa, from Cairo to Kinshasa, from Fez to Abidjan, express
first of all a profound social frustration on which a symbolic manipulation
can have no real effect. Since the governing group meet this pressure by in-
scribing it in the current constitutional debate, they at least can establish a
dialogue between those opposing and those opposed. In this perspective,
the least costly solution and the one most practiced by the princes is to re-
organize the political class and to assure minimal access by certain elites to
centers of power: this is what Sadat did by supporting a multiparty system
in Egypt when the new orientations of his diplomacy risked isolating him,
or the shah during the winter of 1978-79, when he assigned Shapur Bakh-
tiar the task of forming a new government, or the president of Benin when
in February of 1990 he instituted the practice of national conferences,
which was subsequently imitated by the presidents of Congo, Togo, Niger,
Zaire, and by the new president of Mali. The conjunction of the effect of
demonstration and the need to limit as much as possible the transforma-
tion of the political system or the sharing of power leads one to conceive
the process of democratization in elitist and representative terms. How-
ever, in societies where neither the culture nor social practice valorize the
ideas of delegation and representation, such solutions very quickly present
the obvious risk of not being received or a fortiori understood by the popu-
lation and of thus further widening the gap separating political system and
society.

Regarding practices of the opposition, the insertion of the theme of rep-
resentative democracy satisfies several strategic considerations. First of all,
it permits a favorable positioning of opposition movements relative to po-
litical power. While denouncing the reprehensible imitation of Western in-
stitutions, Djamal ed-Din Al-Afghani opposed, in the name of Islamic re-
vivalism, the despotism of the Ottoman sultan and the Persian shah, thereby

162 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

initiating at the end of the nineteenth century a lasting confusion between
the culturalist claim and the call for a democratization of governmental
structures. Even if Afghani and the sheykh Abduh in Egypt challenged the
idea of importing parliamentary and constitutional institutions into the
Muslim world, revivalism gained by defining itself as the expression of a
popular revolt against the prince and closely associating the defense of re-
constructed tradition with the expression of the people’s will. Henceforth,
the institutional dynamic could very likely complete the process and lead
the movements based on opposition practices to claim a place in the politi-
cal scene and in electoral competition, as soon as the latter began to exist,
following the example of what happened after the Persian constitutional
revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The culturalist orientation of opposition strategies can, paradoxically,
serve this shift and impart an original meaning to the practice of repre-
sentation. The return to Law assures first of all the promotion of those who
know it, established not as representatives, but as intermediaries between
the people and a tradition learned and mastered by a very small minority of
scientists and scholars. In such a model, the logic of delegation easily
comes about, for the twofold reasons of theory and opportunity. The peo-
ple abandon the political functions to those who know it; the latter can, in
turn, advantageously confiscate the theory and practice of representative
government simply by modifying the founding formula: elected officials do
not represent the sovereign people, but are chosen and delegated on the
basis of the competence that distinguishes and authorizes them. Subse-
quently, the prospect of opportunity lets the revivalist elite be satisfied
with imported representative institutions and even draw substantial bene-
fits from them: in the phase of active opposition, they help them fulfill
their function as tribunes favorably by penetrating the official political
scene, and by controlling municipalities, such as the Algerian FIS, or as-
sociative and corporatist networks, such as the Egyptian Muslim Brother-
hood; in the process of the conquest of power, they permit them to benefit
from the minimum wage laws of oligarchy, to confiscate the advantages of
the representative order, and endow it with a formula of legitimation of
their own stamp.

Thus did Khomeini move progressively closer to the imported institu-
tions he had earlier violently denounced. Before his arrival in France, the
religious leader did not explicitly subscribe either to the idea of a republic
or to democracy, though, however, he had for quite some time been casti-
gating the shah’s despotism, after the manner of Afghani, and also bring-

IMPORTED PRODUCTS 163

ing to light the constitutional violations of which the shah was guilty. The
ambiguity was already remarkable, since his oppositional discourse inte-
grated references to constitutional order and reflected calls for democrati-
zation. It was, however, on the ideal political order that Khomeini made
the fewest concessions: in his theoretical works as in his statements to the
press, it was a question only of dow/at-e islami (Islamic state) and govern-
ment by the fugaha (jurisconsults).**

It was only on the eve of seizing power that he modified his position: as
of November 1, 1978, Khomeini spoke—and for the first time—of an Islamic
Republic and democratic government. The expression will be amended, of
course, since the idea of democracy underwent severe criticism. The hom-
age, nevertheless, had been rendered and the word figured in Islamist vo-
cabulary at the time of the crucial phase of revolution. In particular, the
practice of representative government remained central to the new repub-
lic. In a culture that should exclude it, the institutions that inspire it are le-
gion: the supreme Guide is designated by a council of experts itself elected
by universal suffrage. At the same time, the president of the republic is also
elected by the people and incarnates an executive power balanced by a leg-
islative power held by a National Assembly, also elected by universal suf-
frage, though its legislative activities are overseen by a council of religious
leaders and designated jurists. This produces a hybrid institutional order in
which the many elective procedures and instances of delegation fulfill a
triple function: to justify internationally the conformity to certain cate-
gories that found the “modern” political order; to institutionalize, by the
practice of delegation, a new political class that has been effectively com-
posed for the most part of scholars and their allies; and to translate into in-
stitutional terms the intermediary identity that theological discourse con-
fers on the religious elite.

Everything happens in reality as if the debate between developmental-
ists and culturalists opposed first of all two types of mediators whose con-
frontation reflected political life: conservative or reformist princes, estab-
lishing legitimacy on their mediation between a traditional populace and a
modernity toward which they intend to lead it; traditional scholars and
businessmen, elaborating the formula that bases their authority on the me-
diation between a desocialized populace and an authenticity that they
alone have mastered and toward which they try to lead it; princes encour-
aging the selective entry of the elite into the center of neopatrimonial
power; opposition members claiming a double exclusivity, one based on
the esoteric nature of their knowledge and the other on their ability to uti-

164 THE IMPORTATION OF POLITICAL MODELS

lize the electoral practices of representative democracy to obtain mandates
and be recognized as a new political class.

This convergence of utilities has evidently limited, even blocked, the
capacity for political innovation, since the terms of the ideal state have
been quickly transcribed into the terms of the imported institutional uni-
verse. As a project of political invention suited to the culture of a specific
society, the theme of democracy risks being a subterfuge that, at times,
serves the prince as a form of interference or as a mode of adjustment, and
at other times, serves the opposition as an instrument of its organization
into a political class.

PART THREE

Failed Universalization
and Creative Deviation

167

Biinee the social sciences have criticized the functionalist, indeed organi-
cist visions that were still in vogue one or two decades ago, it has become
rash to think that social systems can a priori and inevitably protect them-
selves from failure and that they can regenerate after contact with what
challenges or threatens their identity. It would be naive to think that de-
pendent states possess the political capacity to emancipate themselves
from dominance relations: with rare exceptions, sociological analyses do
not venture into this area and do not examine the political production of
peripheral societies for the ways it inverts the international system and
the power relations that organize it. For the same reasons, it is imprudent
to assert that importation practices necessarily lead to a logic of hybrid-
ism or that inflows from without tend necessarily to be appropriated by
the receiving society, as if a mysterious, invisible hand took possession of
goods and symbols conceived and fabricated by other histories and other
cultures.

For all that, Jean-Francois Bayart’s hypothesis,’ in particular, has met
with at least four opposing arguments. First, the processes of westerniza-
tion do not take root only in receiving societies: as inflows, they also belong
to the international space that helps make them and organize them, as well
as perpetuate them and give them meaning; it is highly probable that the
international order constrains and limits the reappropriation initiatives
that one or another actor could take. Second, such initiatives cannot be
thought of as a priori: their formation presupposes that social actors with
sufficient resources find those initiatives valuable; however, we have seen
that importation makes sense for those who bring it about, and that there
is little evidence that those who benefit from it wish to reverse it. Moreover,
the effect of hybridization can be envisioned only as the effect of several ac-
tions—strategies, perhaps—about which one can postulate neither homo-
geneity nor consciousness: if it is clear that certain actors in the receiving
societies react to disorders caused by the importation of foreign models,
one can, without much risk of error, suppose that their reactions are di-
verse and contradictory, and that it would be miraculous if they led to a co-
herent and functional synthesis. Finally, the idea of appropriation finds its
basic strength in the postulate of its efficiency: political relations reach op-
timum effectiveness as soon as they are comprehensible to those whom
they affect and would, therefore, suppose a combination of imported data
with data derived from tradition. Yet nothing supports a priori the idea
that the actors who hold power prefer this formula, whereas formulas of
substitution that are valid in the short term do exist: the populist stance,

168 PART THREE

recourse to clientelist relations, and the glorification of particularism of-
ten appear as easy diversions from reappropriation.

Nevertheless, the effects of importation remain fixed: importation cre-
ates a disorder that, as we have seen, often reinforces relations of depen-
dence; however, this disorder disrupts systems of meaning, processes of
identification, modes of collective action, and forms of government: for
this reason, it gives rise to new political practices, as well as forms of in-
vention and political innovation. Internationally, disorder is measured in
terms of the contradictions deriving from the logic of forced ‘imitation:
acute dissensus regarding the legitimacy of law, regulations, and practices;
uncertainties around the identity of actors; increasingly clear distinctions
between “governing states” and “governed states”; growing dissociation
between populations and states; and the spreading of anomie throughout
the international scene. Though criticized, nation-state logic doubles as a
transnational logic that increasingly interests sociologists and whose effect
of recomposition seems as massive as it does complex. Putting into per-
spective the entirety of these dynamics allows one to locate both the force
and the limits of the processes of westernization, to determine what checks
and what encourages innovation, to appreciate the reality of possible adap-
tations, and to evaluate the importance of failed reappropriations.

5- Internal Disorders

‘hee main result of the massive importation of structures of authority is a
loss of meaning that strains relations between the government and those
governed and even more, the entirety of political relations. Whether or not
this loss of meaning is compensated for by a process of doubling or by ne-
gotiations between the modern and the traditional, this loss of meaning
considerably influences the strategies of both those in positions of author-
ity and those individuals requesting allocations. This is diametrically op-
posed to Western political history, in that the European state was con-
structed by dynastic centers possessing a traditional legitimacy, in line with
ancient Christian and Roman cultural models and based on differentiated
strategies used by social actors seeking their own advantages.

The loss of meaning constitutes an important loss for the official politi-
cal scene. It discourages the individual in his efforts to adapt to an institu-
tional life that does not concern itself with him. Such efforts thus remain
exclusive to the importing political elite, who use exogenous formulas in
order to grow stronger and thus stimulate internal competition. Thus it
was with the constitutional revisions begun in Algeria following the trag-
edies in the fall of 1988, twenty years after General de Gaulle used them to
calm the crisis of May 1968. The debates of democratization derived from
the same logic when the African national conferences attempted to unite
the various elements of the elite in order to define the conditions of a mul-
tiparty system that could accelerate the formal installation of Western rep-
resentative government.

I70 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

Recent research has resolved the paradox of this approach and its lack
of effect among those governed. Yves Fauré has shown in regard to the
Ivory Coast that competitive or semicompetitive elections were more
weakly supported than plebiscites offering a single candidate were.’ Fauré
notes that even for the 1990 legislature, participation varied from 21 per-
cent in districts offering numerous candidates to 99 percent when the
PDCI candidate ran unopposed. Clearly, in these conditions plebiscite
manipulation does not explain everything. Similarly, the level of political
awareness, fetishized by traditional electoral sociology, does not seem to
count for much here. The correlation between participation and absence
of choice was as clear in the various communes composing the urban zone
of Abidjan as in the rural districts. Fauré wisely resists the facile cultural-
ist interpretation that emphasizes the African tradition of seniority and
consensus. The example of the Ivory Coast—which we saw elsewhere—does
not support the commonly held view that a single-party system is the nat-
ural or functional formula of government in Africa. The most credible ex-
planation is probably more prosaic: faced with meaningless institutions,
the individual recomposes his strategy according to a double—particular-
ist and utilitarian—calculation. Unable to merge into a valorized political
community, as is the case with an electoral body carrying national sover-
eignty, he looks to the electoral process for the formalization of a patron-
client relation that offers easy and certain access to the official political
scene. In other words, no cultural formula, no symbolic valorization can,
as it does in Western democracies, correct or invert the Olsonian cost of
electoral participation.

The effect of this loss of meaning is fearsome: it tends to place a burden
not just on voting but on any kind of political participation; it locks pro-
spective democratization in a delicate dilemma: either democratization
must be completely redefined and thus undergo an “appropriation” occur-
ring in the most fundamental reaches of the society, or it will be revived in
an artificial and deceptive manner because the rationale of identity pene-
trates the electoral scene and assures easy success to confessional or ethnic
parties, as in the Muslim world, but also in India, Japan, and even occa-
sionally in sub-Saharan Africa. In the first case, the appropriation is a
lengthy process; in the second, it is only the very ambiguous juxtaposition
of two mutually exclusive universes of meaning.

As soon as it loses meaning for the social actors, politics undergoes a
profound recomposition whose characteristics can be found in the most
widely diverse cultures: the institutional vectors themselves produce social

INTERNAL DISORDERS I7z

movements that tend to construct a competing space of legitimacy outside
the official political scene; the political community essentially changes,
abandoning its nation-state referent in favor of contradictory dynamics
combining particularist affirmation with imperial action; the allegiance of
citizenship loses its relevance, which exposes a simultaneous decrease in
empty social spaces within which the state can no longer impose its au-
thority; and in order to propagate itself, the leadership must concede more
and more to a neopopulism that effectively hamstrings its relations with so-
ciety. These are such heavy consequences of the importation rationale that,
though they can serve the cause of innovation and appropriation, they can
do so only in a very selective and very uneven manner.

New Mobilizations

Societies that import Western political models undergo a recurrent crisis of
mobilization that evokes new social movements currently at work in certain
European countries. The relatively recent crisis of the providence states
and the decrease of their ability to react have helped deport a previously in-
tegrated and even routine social movement toward a political space beyond
the government institutions in place, resulting in less orderly demands and
in a mode of action where the symbolic expression and the questioning of
values prevail over the strictly utilitarian mobilization identified with tra-
ditional union organizations.’ As a result, identity demands, the denuncia-
tion of modernity, the tendency to spontaneity, and organizational flexibil-
ity appear as so many major traits. It is not surprising that mobilization took
on this type of orientation at a much earlier date in non-Western societies.
Little studied by political sociology, it had already espoused most of the
traits that the abundant literature devoted to new European social move-
ments is now discovering in our Old Continent. This similarity can be eas-
ily explained. Outside the institutional track, mobilization is more success-
ful and legitimate because it substitutes a utilitarian approach with a call for
alternative values, notably ones pertaining to identity; weakly integrated in
sociopolitical activity that can no longer contain it or neutralize it, mobi-
lization rebels against ritualization, organization, and trivialization.

The parallel probably stops once the convergent effects of extra-institu-
tional contestation become obvious. Such contestation, however, does not
have the same meaning when it is, as in Western Europe, caused by a crisis
affecting the distributive capacity of the state, and when it derives in other
areas from processes of delegitimation and loss of meaning that accompany

I72 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

the massive importation of foreign political models. This importation rad-
icalizes the features of the new social movements: faced with weak institu-
tions that are losing their meaning, contestation claims to produce a direct
counterlegitimacy; thus it is even more external to the order in place and
emerges as a protest-uprising and as a form of mobilization completely dis-
sociated from expression by the people. For this reason, collective protest,
whatever its object, tends to occur in moments of expression of identity, as
if all social or economic uneasiness were directly imputed to the work of
deculturation by individuals or groups that were its victims. ~

Many illustrations from various places and times seem to confirm this
hypothesis. The Iranian revolution of 1906 was thus partly initiated by a
purely categorical economic problem having to do with government regu-
lation of the price of sugar, which had undergone an unprecedented rise
caused by the crisis in Russia, Persia’s main supplier. Merchants in the
bazaar, refusing to lower their prices as mandated by the state, were se-
verely sanctioned. What should have been an uneventful protest action im-
mediately became an expression of identity. Merchants gathered in one of
Teheran’s main mosques and asked the u/ama to articulate their requests.
To better support these requests, principal ayatollahs decided on a sym-
bolic exile that took them a few kilometers outside the capital to a famous
pilgrimage site, where the people came in support. They asked the shah to
permit their return and to make certain concessions, including notably the
application of the sharia in its entirety and the adoption of a constitution.
Hesitation on the part of the shah provoked further collective action, lead-
ing to an unprecedented action by the shah, in response to which many
women demanded that the u/ama, “which had sanctioned their marriage,”
be respected.*

Such shifts can, of course, be explained by the authoritarian nature of a
political system that, outside religious institutions, offers no vectors of
protest. They are further clarified by reference to an effective strategy of re-
cuperation on the part of the clergy. This explanation is, however, inade-
quate: its inscription within a religious context gave protest its mobilizing
effectiveness and a legitimacy of substitution that caused the shah to con-
cede and that transformed a categorical claim, that is, the claim of an indi-
vidual group, into a revolutionary process. This inscription was much
more than instrumental, since it gave meaning to mobilization and consti-
tuted the very foundation of the denunciation of the political system in
place and of its titular head.

This type of articulation was seen again seventy years later in the Is-

INTERNAL DISORDERS 173

lamic revolution. The active protest undertaken by the bazaar merchants
against the shah conserved the same crystallization of identity, affirmed all
the more because it jointly denounced the government’s deflationary poli-
cies and the competition imposed by the modern and transnational sectors
of the economy. Popularizing the slogan: “Islamic Republic, neither East
nor West,” the large manifestations of winter 1978-79 explicitly blamed
the accumulated frustrations on imitation, making the extolling of Islamic
identity not so much a model or a solution, but the very emblem of protest
mobilization.

Abdelkadar Zghal interprets the reactivation of tradition in contempo-
rary Tunisia in very much the same way, emphasizing that it derives from
several social behaviors, whether they be the reappearance of sorcery and |
maraboutism in the rural milieu, the reviving of moral proselytism among
the local notables, or particularly the return to Islam by the young.‘ This last
component produced the MTI, mediated by the religious education circles
that proliferated in the 1970s around the mosques in Tunis. These circles at-
tracted a youth population, inserted—but not integrated—into a modern so-
ciety that offered it no social categories capable of meeting its expectations
or articulating its needs in social protest. Under these conditions, the ma-
nipulation of Islamic symbols no longer offers a particularly effective con-
text for social protest, but is rather a substitute for it, in that the production
of identity takes the place of a failed protest expression.

The mechanism has become common in the Muslim world, where most
social movements, springing from the most ordinary disquiet, converge to-
ward the same expression of identity. Hence on February 26, 1986, Egypt-
ian Central Security Force conscripts reacted to the rumor of an extension
in their period of service with violence against tourist hotels, night clubs,
and cabarets near the Pyramids, completely vandalizing and burning them.”
In December 1990, the call for a general strike given by the Moroccan
unions (CDT and UGTM) was rapidly transformed into an uprising against
the city of Fez by the youth and others who felt excluded; this led to the to-
tal destruction of the luxury hotel Merinides, frequented by Western tour-
ists, and the appearance of slogans supporting Saddam Hussein. These are
two examples among many where social movement evolves into an expres-
sion of identity that gives meaning to its mobilization. The difficult condi-
tions of military service, in one case, recriminations linked to the high cost
of living, of underemployment, and the restriction of freedom in the other,
are as if sublimated into a denunciation of Western luxury assimilated to
debauchery and illicit behavior. Protest has no meaning as a demand ad-

I74 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

dressed to the political system; it is legitimate only to the extent that it op-
poses one identity to another, wherein it expresses the revenge of a culture
perceived as dominated against a culture considered dominant. The logic of
the rejection and recomposition of identity is violently opposed to the logic
of hybridization.

The social movements that have developed in India share in essence
these same characteristics. The noticeable increase in mobilizations based
on identity and the increasingly important role of religious processions and
intercommunity uprisings must be paralleled with the crisis of legitimacy
in India that weakened the government ’s capacity for institutional integra-
tion. The model of a secular state dominated by an ideology of importation,
articulated by the Congress Party, is increasingly met by a restoration of re-
ligious communalism that tends to include and sublimate an entire ensem-
ble of claims and frustrations. One could thus show how the painful eco-
nomic upheavals that hit Gujarat, and in particular the city of Anmadabad
in the 1960s very quickly transformed into intercommunity tensions. In
September of 1969, an anti-Muslim uprising sparked on religious pretexts
resulted in more than five hundred dead, according to the official count,
whereas on a deeper level, it expressed the exasperation of a small, unem-
ployed Hindu proletariat at the more privileged situation enjoyed by the
Muslim community.°

From a situation in which socioeconomic frustrations are expressed in
terms of identity, we seem to gradually slide toward a new type of mobiliza-
tion, where the expression of identity alone is sufficient. The increase in
community uprisings observed in India in the beginning of the tg80s was
fed both by an increased competition between the two communities, as ev-
idenced by what happened in the Ayodhia Temple, * and by continually con-
firmed fears among the Hindus that pan-Islamic progress would upset the
Indian sociopolitical order. The ante is raised here, because the affirmation
of identity itself constitutes an intensification of the stakes, confiscating
and marginalizing in turn all the other themes of the sociopolitical debate.
The “ritual of provocation” that led the Hindu processions carrying vivid
images of pigs’ heads to pass by the mosques accords with new slogans de-
nouncing “Gulf money” in particular, in order to give the mobilization of
identity a central role in political debate. The result is all the more con-

\

“Translator’s Note: The Ayodhia Temple is a Hindu temple located in Ayodhia, Ut-
tar Pradesh, the region considered to be the birthplace of Rama. A mosque stood on
the site until Hindu fundamentalists destroyed it in 1992. The incident triggered vi-
olent confrontations between Muslims and Hindus.

INTERNAL DISORDERS 175

vincing in that the recurrence of communitary uprisings activates modes
of allegiance and identification, which is particularly noticeable in a soci-
ety where hierarchy and divisions into castes and sects tend to atomize the
Hindu world into a complex cosmogony that previously limited its ability to
organize politically.’

Comparable occurrences of this identity-based crystallization of the so-
cial movement can be seen in numerous other cases as different as those in
Japan and Latin America, which most often benefit religious sects, partic-
ularly when they acquire messianic referents. This clever composition al-
lows them to take command of many social demands, as can be seen, for ex-
ample, in their supervisory function in the protest movements around the
construction of the new Tokyo airport, or also in movements developed
among the victims of Guatemala’s 1976 earthquake. Whether it concern
the Chukoku-Ha sect in the first case or the Seventh-Day Adventists in the
second, these new entrepreneurs of social movement tend to separate so-
cial movements from the state’s sphere, to give them their own legitimacy,
distinct from their official institutional legitimacy, and to confuse protest
with the affirmation of a new identity, one that contradicts the identity on
which citizenship is based.

The juxtaposition of these two examples suggests that the identity-based
expression of social movements does not necessarily involve direct protest
by the national community and the claim for an alternative community.
While we have been able to show that the particularly successful sects in
Latin America were among the Indian populations who found a sacred rit-
ual practiced in the pre-Hispanic period mirrored in their protest, the sec-
tarian mobilization effected in modern Japanese society in no way aims to
dismantle the national community but rather to confirm it. In that respect,
articulations of demands and claims by identity movements do not under-
mine the interaction possible between socioeconomic protest and protest
in the national context. It suggests, more convincingly, the defiance of so-
cial actors regarding the institutional channels of expression and their sur-
prising availability for making claims that mix the tribunal system with the
claim to a substitute legitimacy in order to counter the imported state. Sig-
nificantly, from this point of view, the resulting type of movement no
longer derives from a discourse on the state or addressed to the state, but a
discourse on the identity project activating it. The general strike in Fez in
December 1990 that disintegrated into a riot denounced first of all the os-
tentatious luxury and the American action against Saddam Hussein, and
thus abandoned the Moroccan interpellation to promote the affirmation of

176 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

Islamic identity; the same reaction occurred when those Egyptians who felt
threatened regarding the lengthening of their term of military service no
longer expressed anything but their desire for a rigorous return to the
sharia. In the same way, the question of sugar prices reached the maximum
of its mobilizing capacity when it led the women, as we have seen during
the first Iranian revolution, to defend the uwlama, which had “sanctioned
their marriage.” Similarly, the evolution of the practice of riots in India
shows that the denunciation of “Gulf money,” of the rise of pan-Islamism,
or of Muslim claims to the Ayodhia Temple became not only thie emblems
but the dominant stakes of mobilization, and to such a degree that the state
became a passive, powerless and even superfluous actor in the effort of
making claims. Paradoxically, this increasing abandoning of the state by a
social movement that seems to want specifically to devaluate it promotes a
forceful return of international parameters into political debate. The po-
liticization of making claims no longer occurs through an appeal to the
state, or even by a frontal attack on the state, but by an identity-based and
transnational articulation of those claims.

In these conditions, it is within multinational societies that the corre-
spondence between the making of claims, national identity-based action,
and direct protest against the state appears most clearly. The state naturally
becomes a victim, since even more than its very nature, its existence as a
producer of the political community is attacked. The case of Yugoslavia
clearly reveals the same passage from making claims to identity affirmation,
accompanied this time by an explicit negation of the state. The active phase
of this process began in March 1981 when, to protest unemployment and liv-
ing conditions, the students of Pristina engaged in collective action that
very quickly involved the workers because it immediately took on a nation-
alist color and evolved into a claim for the recognition of the cultural speci-
ficity of the Albanian population in Kosovo. In the entire Yugoslav Federa-
tion, 1987 saw 1,623 strikes mobilizing 365,000 strikers; 1988 counted
1,720 involving 400,000. In practically each case, demands for higher
wages evolved into denunciations of economic exploitation of one republic
by another.®

This entire crystallization of identity-based demands is found in a politi-
cal scene that assures the growing success of the parties evolving there: the
Muslim Brotherhood Movement in Egypt and the Sudan, the MTI, later the
En-Nadah in Tunisia, the FIS in Algeria, also the RSS, later the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), in India, and the Komeito party in Japan are only a few
of the most important examples attesting to their geographic and cultural

INTERNAL DISORDERS a77

diversity, and thus their presence in areas having nothing in common but
the way they treat the consequences of the importation of the Western
model of the state.

The irruption of identity parties on the political scene has substantially
disrupted the imported rules of the game. The main characteristic of these
parties is their promulgation of a type of identification that claims prece-
dence over the allegiance of citizenship and therefore attempts to take its
place. Fundamentally, then, the identity party differs from the others: its
project is not to compete for political power, but essentially to work for al-
ternative socialization and mobilization and to promote a political identity
different from what is officially proclaimed. In this, the identity party has lit-
tle chance of evolving, as do workers’ parties that do not challenge the idea
of citizenship, but rather rely on it to legitimate the rights of their members
and to call for a transformation of sociopolitical structures. For this reason,
the drift of the worker parties toward a tribune function was much more log-
ical, since it wished to lead the working class to full citizenship, and to op-
pose the idea of a merely formal integration of the workers into society with
a genuine integration. By associating itself with exclusionary logic, the
identity party seeks to dismantle allegiance to the state in order to develop
a more efficient and effective process of reintegration, one that remains if
not mythical, at least very strongly and perfectly symbolic. In that, the iden-
tity party is essentially the producer of a negative mobilization.

The thematic of these parties is already enlightening. The return to reli-
gious law or the strict observance of a sacred ritual applied to civil life, the
appeal for the City of God, or at least that of the Prophet, the reference to
Hindu divinities or the return to the mystical thought of the Japanese Bud-
dhist reformer Nichiren (1222-82) do not have a programmatic value, but
an emblematic one. Similarly, and more concretely, the return to Islamic
law has more value as a critique of the imported legal order than as support
for a future project. Citing the Islamic renewal in Kenya and Senegal,
Christian Coulon notes that the claim for an Islamic law of succession does
not correspond to any “quest for a lost paradise” in the countries where
this law had no history, but is seen rather “as a critical weapon of existing
society” and as “a constructivist vision of another reality.” They aim, he
writes, “to denounce the misdeeds of western civilization and to imagine
another way.” It is, in fact, this order of the “imaginary” or of “vision”
that strains the programmatic function of identity parties and that, in par-
ticular, subjects this function to a preliminary redefinition of the political
identity of those to whom it is addressed: it is as a Hindu and not as an [n-

178 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

dian, as a Muslim and not as a Senegalese that the individual who answers
the call of one or the other of these organizations identifies himself. These
organizations are no longer agents of reappropriation of imported political
models; rather, they are the very source of the denunciation of a logic of
borrowing and its construction as the high stakes of mobilization.

At the same time, this mobilization appears more and more an end in it-
self. For the RSS, and later the BJP, religious festivals, the crowning of
Rama or Shiva, the processions in which it takes the initiative constitute si-
multaneously a means to reaffirm Hindu identity and to give it a political
significance. The phenomenon is even more total in that the participants
see an immediate remuneration, since the lower castes and untouchables
benefit from an integration into an intercaste movement. This same logic
of ritual as a provider of identity is found in the way Islamic parties function
through public collective prayers, dress, street processions, demonstra-
tions, and pilgrimages. The services thus exchanged among identity par-
ties and their base, outside of fulfilling traditional political functions, are
sufficiently important to discourage their leaders from rectifying their
strategy and accepting their integration, and hence their banalization
within the current political system.

The Particularist-Empire Dialectic

Yet the awakening of identity concerns is not just an obvious element of po-
litical mobilization. Its pertinence extends even to the configuration of an
entire political system, principally insofar as it calls into question the real-
ization of that political system as a nation. The latter is openly defied, pro-
tested, and destructured as an exogenous political model, according to a
process that promotes an alternating drift toward microparticularisms and
imperial reconstructions. The instability of the very notion of citizenship
and the weakness of its interiorization explain the essential aspect of a
process that is, moreover, activated by the failure of integration efforts
such as occurred with the governmental crises in Africa and Asia, the arbi-
trariness of divisions, the regression of political, Marxist, socialist, or na-
tionalist ideologies, and of horizontal solidarities capable of structuring
the national political community. This last failure is the construction of a
political debate that could validate the state as a category in Africa, the
Middle East, or South or East Asia.

Individuals in Africa and Asia respond to the experience of the state,
the administration, interest and ideological groups by political action

INTERNAL DISORDERS 179

against any form of horizontal integration. In those rare societies where a
multiparty system is maintained, the political debate it supposedly sup-
ports is increasingly upset by a particularist logic that limits its basic ef-
fect. The irruption of identity parties, such as the Komeito in Japan, the
RSS and then the BJP in India, or the Islamist parties, intensifies the po-
litical debate, which becomes simultaneously a debate among citizens and
a debate on citizenship: instead of activating identification with the state
as nation, political competition does it a disservice. Especially since the
classical parties are quick to hurt themselves, reinforcing as they do their
factional and clientelist structure and replacing their integrating function
with the active reproduction of vertical solidarities. The phenomenon is
particularly remarkable in the case of Japan, where, behind an apparently
successful importation of the Western model of representative democracy,
hes hidden the rigorous maintenance of traditional Japanese clan organi-
zation. Each deputy is thus endowed with ajiban, that is, an electoral clien-
tele personally attached to him, independently of his partisan affiliation
and of which he becomes the owner. This client network is itself consti-
tuted by a Aoenkai, a support association that prolongs the former limited
traditional groups, rural hamlets, or neighborhood blocks, and appears as
the true authority of political communalization for the Japanese. As mu-
tual aid associations, sites of sociability, and channels for requests, the
koenkai mobilize on the community bases they reproduce rather than dis-
solving them into a national whole: as Jean-Marie Bouissou has noted, they
remain the threshhold of individual political involvement within a society
where partisan militancy attracts very few people.” In turn, this clientelist
and community structure transforms the parties, notably the Liberal Dem-
ocratic Party (LDP) in Japan, into a juxtaposition of clienteles and fac-
tions, as can be observed in India with the Congress Party, in Turkey with
the officially sanctioned principal parties, and even in the single-party sys-
tems in Africa or the Middle East.

This failure of national socialization makes, in very diverse ways, the
fortune of microcommunitary solidarities: it tends to revive the political
importance of the village group, notably in sub-Saharan African societies,
and confirm the autonomy of family farms; it also revives “prenational
identities,” "' notably in the tribal states of the Sahel, but also in numerous
African countries such as Liberia, Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, as well as the
Horn of Africa, and the entire southern part of Africa. In a different form,
the crisis of the nation-state in nearby zones of importation, such as Central
and Eastern Europe, activates subnational decomposition into increasingly

180 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

smaller ethnic groups, all the while valorizing the village group and the
peasant microsociety as the privileged site of identification.

The particularist dynamic not only brings about fragmentation but also
promotes the constitution of network groups that successfully work against
the allegiance of citizenship by transgressing borders. Faced with the
state’s default of identification, the individual disposes of an infinite num-
ber of positions that create many new and active solidarities: insertion into
transnational cultural collectivities, churches or sects, allegiance to mer-
chant diasporas, implication in various economic inflows. 2

The identification of transnational religious collectivities echoes the
challenge to the state model pretty much everywhere. The success of the
Catholic Church, particularly in Africa, can be correlated with the disaf-
fection felt by the state and the people: the surge of the faithful to Sunday
mass in Zimbabwe must be connected to the desertion affecting the official
meetings of the ZANU. Moreover, independent churches and sects have
more chance to extend their influence in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin
America because their messianic message, their stronger adaptability to lo-
cal particularisms, as well as their greater organizational and dogmatic
flexibility, allow them to capture a decisive share of popular allegiance. The
election of Jorge Serrano, an adept of an evangelical sect, as Guatemala’s
president reveals a process that occurs elsewhere: Alberto Fujimori was
brought to power in Peru by the Cambio 90 movement, structured and or-
ganized by the same allegiance; in his wake, a Baptist preacher was elected
vice president, while 20 percent of the deputy and senatorial candidates on
this list were Protestants. In Bolivia, home to six hundred non-Catholic
churches, President Paz Zamora thought it wise to take part in a day of
prayers organized by the Protestants. In South America’s Andean coun-
tries, the Indian population tends to identify with the new movements that

allow them to more effectively express their particularisms: hence the suc-
cess of pentecostal preachers among Bolivia’s Guarani Indians, the strong
penetration of Protestant missionaries in the representation structures of
Peru’s Indian communities, the importance of proselytism in the Quechua
language among Ecuador’s Chimborazo Indians. Similarly, the Vatican it-
self counts about 600,000 conversions annually of Brazilian Catholics to
Protestantism.”

This dynamic is important both quantitatively and qualitatively. It in-
contestably expresses an identity-based movement, which is all the more
vigorous in that it claims, through massive conversions, the way out of an
order to which it declares itself exterior. At the same time, the example of

INTERNAL DISORDERS 181

sects in Latin America is particularly remarkable, because this explicit
manifestation of exit behavior generates in turn a new dilemma of the par-
ticular and the universal. Activated by a particularist affirmation, this strat-
egy leads its adherents into an affiliation with numerous networks that, as
with the Protestant churches, claim a new kind of universalism. The suc-
cess of pan-Islamism or pan-Hinduism has the same effect. Through all
these cases, we find the same identity-based protest directed against the cit-
izen’s relation of allegiance to the state, the same criticism of the univer-
salist illusion, but also the same inclination to reconstruct vast transna-
tional solidarities, sublimating the particularist profession of faith in the
adherence to an ensemble that is, in fact, sufficiently vast to contain the mi-
crocommunitarian pressure and at least partially reconstruct certain at-
tributes of universality.

The strength of this new associative behavior lies in the constitution of
several transnational human networks that increasingly mobilize interac-
tions, as, for example, the astounding vitality of merchant diasporas sug-
gests. The progress of informal economy, particularly in Africa, occurs
through cross-border economic flows that disable state control and replace
the citizenship relation by other solidarities that currently combine ethnic
affiliation and utilitarian objectives such as the smuggling of money, cocoa,
or manufactured goods. Certain zones, such as the Nigeria-Togo-Benin
group, are so active that the state seems completely outdone by it, some-
times its victim and at others a beneficiary. But the extrapolitical recompo-
sition of social bonds here obeys allegiances that subtly ally the microcom-
munity with the larger socioeconomic whole, which in any case, no longer
has anything of the state about it."

This observation holds for the diaspora of Lebanese merchants in West
Africa, as it does for the Swahili along the shores of the Indian Ocean."
Francois Constantin notes the quality and density of the associative move-
ment reuniting members of Muslim communities over and above their cit-
izenship in Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania, where
they are particularly in the minority.'’’ He also shows how the promptness
of the communities to integrate themselves into a transnational network
favoring radical Islam has led each of these countries to promote the or-
ganization of their Muslim citizens into specific centers and give the local
gadi considerable juridical power: to better protect itself, the state unrav-
els and relinquishes itself. The equilibrium can appear functional for all
parties; nevertheless, it leads to a regression of the citizenship allegiance,
to a relative institutionalization of communitarianism, to an officialization

182 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

of identity-based sentiments, though the logic of transnational identifica-
tion with the diaspora is not totally broken.

Thus resembling the crisis of the Western model of the state, identity-
based expression helps noticeably, but in a very contradictory way, to re-
structure political space. The disaffection plaguing governments in Africa,
Asia, and even in Latin America and Eastern Europe is compensated for by
a return to the particularism that reactivates the microcommunitary polit-
ical order as much as it does transnational groups, whose territory is un-
certain and who come into being to the extent that the dominated cultures
or those cultures facing annihilation at the hands of the importing state are
politically rehabilitated.

These vast ensembles hark back to the traditional imperial order in
many respects. They have inherited several of its characteristics: they func-
tion like a multinational-—or, at least, a non-national—political community;
they solidify a valorized cultural identity that they strive more or less to
spread; they suppose a weak differentiation between the social and the po-
litical, challenging the very existence of a unified and autonomous civil so-
ciety; their degree of institutionalization is weak, just as is the ability of the
central political power to reach each individual subject other than by de-
ploying a military type of overmobilization or very elaborate totalitarian
techniques. In these respects, the empire is constituted as a political cate-
gory on very different bases from those of the state: as a product invented
at a certain moment of time, the state was theorized very rapidly, since its
history was immediately the object of law; the project undertaken by the
founders of the state was sufficiently clear and structured for it to be
quickly thought of as a universal, that is, as an entity that could impose it-
self onto private interests and intermediate groups, but also onto cultural
collectivities that produced their own meaning. Public space thus delin-
eated private space, in order not to compromise the state and its citizens
with the society of individuals. As for the empire, it was never theorized, or
even really thought out: it had no Hegel, no legists, and no law professors.
Its identification is uncertain: the comparison of the Chinese, Muslim, and
Roman empires reveals that their conceptual ambiguity has to do with the
strong tension between the particular and the universal, which, ultimately,
explains their success and their fragility. In that they are constituted by ref-
erence to a culture that their founders seek to promote above all others,
they have a particularist orientation; finalized and legitimated by the ex-
plicit postulate that this culture’s vocation is to spread, they also have a
universalist significance and intent. It is precisely from this tension that

INTERNAL DISORDERS 183

they derive their principal characteristics: their militarization, their un-
certain territoriality, the ambiguity of their borders, their fervent prose-
lytism, and their weak institutionalization. From this tension comes their
incompatibility with the very idea of nation, which is envisioned as a terri-
torializable political community; it is because of this fact also that the em-
pire rests on a more or less assured articulation of microcommunal and
macrocultural solidarities.

Thus constructed, the empire appears like a transhistorical and ideal-
typical category, one that designates a political dynamic that is more or less
in effect everywhere in the world and in the most diverse contexts. History
and anthropology can, of course, contrast societies that, like China or the
Muslim world, have known a rather strong imperial continuity and, others,
like sub-Saharan Africa or the Indian world, which have known only ephem-
eral empires. The nature of culture and of the social bond have, in turn, been
mobilized for explicative ends: here the idea of harmony or of unity, there of
a plural cosmogony or a weak disenchantment of the world, rival the idea of
community integration, culminating in the production of convincing hy-
potheses. However, the reflection on the current political order undercuts
the debate somewhat. The evolution of communication techniques gives
new support to transnational relations and a new future to macrocultural sol-
idarities. Video cassettes and televised images, pilgrimages, attendance by
young Muslim Senegalese or Nigerians at the Koranic universities of Al-
Ashar or Qom, Filipino students in Teheran universities and their [ranian
counterparts on the campuses of Manila—all help activate mobility and
bonds within vast cultural spaces, whose simple existence suggests the con-
tours of new imperial spaces indicating new political practices.

These new empires are certainly not new political institutions. Their
combination with a state logic that, as we have already shown, conserves
important supports, makes their levels of authority even more difficult and
fragile, as is revealed, for example, by the vicissitudes and even the failures
of the Islamic Conference Organization and a fortiori because it is more de-
manding, the Arab League.

In reality, the imperial dynamic escapes state control, whereas the in-
terest of the state’s leaders is very generally to contain and even to thwart
it. Thus this dynamic is composed, either from below, on the initiative of
the different “entrepreneurs” of the mobilizing culture, or from above, on
that of the prince, who abandons state strategy in order to gain the upper
hand by imperial strategy. Imperial order and state order face and oppose
each other, worsening as well the conditions of individual political identi-

184 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

fication. The more or less normal citizens of a state find themselves on
many occasions the informal but genuinely mobilized subjects of empires
that have no legal existence.

The imperial project immediately evokes the situation in the Muslim
world, where the various characteristics enumerated above can be found in
conjunction with a continuous tradition dating back almost to the time of
the Prophet. The current recourse to imperial strategies is part of the de-
liberate rejection of the state model and concerns the various types of ac-
tors already mentioned: revivalist movements and intellectuals wanted to
construct a pan-Islamic space with a real political identity; during the Gulf
War Saddam Hussein sought to mobilize the Muslim world against the
coalition states, just as did many initiatives of the Ayatollah Khomeini,
Muammar Gadhafi and, in his own time, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Article 11 of
the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran stipulates that “the Iranian
government must exercise continuous efforts to realize political, eco-
nomic, and cultural unity in the Islamic world,” whereas article 154 consid-
ers it the goal of the Republic to bring “happiness to men of all societies.” ”

The dialectic of the empire and the microcommunitarian is not, how-
ever, the prerogative of the Muslim world alone. Hindu revivalist move-
ments militate in the same way for the construction of a unified “society-
nation” that transcends the autonomies granted by the confederal system
of the Indian Republic, which stretches beyond the current boundaries of
the union, even to the whole of the Indian world, all the while finding its
equilibrium in the revitalization of the village and the panchayati-ray.
Other recompositions seem to go in the same direction: the breakup of
the socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe appears to give rise to
the same dynamic, combining an almost endless slippage of identifica-
tions toward small collectivities and a reactivation of affiliations to larger,
but less easily territorializable groups. Thus the almost daily discovery of
groups claiming sovereignty and inaugurating a real “political micros-
copy” (North and South Ossetians, Nenetses, Buriates, etc.) is on a par
with the rise in pan-Turkism, pan-Slavism, pan-Magyarism, and even pan-
Germanism, which finds a political resonance among the Germans of the
Volga. The resulting political geometry makes state interaction increas-
ingly uncomfortable, while it encourages leaders to employ imperial
strategies for their own benefit, at least when they provide some political
or diplomatic advantage.

Japan and China are related to a large extent through this logic of dou-
bling. The first is also characterized by powerful microcommunitarian sol-

INTERNAL DISORDERS 185

idarities left intact by the imported idea of citizenship and by the glorifica-
tion of transnational Japanese networks that increasingly supply the eco-
nomic and social life of Northeast and Southeast Asia. As for China, it has
long preserved an imperial structure that, in contrast to the others, has
conceded nothing in any formal way to the logic of the nation-state. It still
prevails because of the ancient political practice of combining the solidar-
ity of familial communities with the force of imperial authority, which has
always dominated the nobility. Important recent studies in sinology show
the topicality of this data and the pertinence of a neotraditionalist ap-
proach that relies on the functionality of these microcommunitarian soli-
darities, which neither the construction of a modern state nor a heavily
mobilizing regime has diminished. It appears, in fact, that during the
height of the Maoist period authority was maintained in the factories by
strong particularist networks and by the strength of clientelism."* At the
same time, the Chinese state order was more than ever brought into an im-
perial dynamic that relativized the meaning of its state borders. First, it
comes from a several thousand-year-old history that makes its exterior pe-
riphery into the space of “border people,” whose sovereignty is uncertain
and fragile: Mongols, Turks, Tibetans, Thais, Burmese, and especially Viet-
namese have recently known-or still know-this experience. Furthermore,
this imperial orientation is strengthened by the diaspora, whose vitality
and strong cultural solidarity give the Chinese world a political geometry
that significantly overflows its own legal territorial boundaries.’ Some 30
million Chinese live abroad, notably in Southeast Asia: in Singapore, where
they have power, and in Malaysia, where they constitute a strong minority.
The Teochew, a particularly active migratory group originally from the
northeast portion of Canton province, number 5 million in Thailand,
where they control three of the five most important familial economic
groups, and one million in Hong Kong, including Li Jiachen, the richest
businessman on the island. Juridically, the Chinese state has by turns
sought to incorporate them by establishing in 1949 a rigorous interpreta-
tion of the jus sanguinis, to then reject them during the Cultural Revolu-
tion, then to readopt them more recently in order to preserve its relations
with neighboring states. This diaspora continues to supply financial and
merchant inflows that benefit the Chinese economy (with about one billion
dollars in cash per year); it has also created a “sinicized world” that acti-
vates its allegiances by an extremely dense associative network that repro-
duces the principal features of Chinese culture. In sum, these diasporas
maintain the networks of integration that for the most part escape the

186 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

world of states and incite, as in the Muslim and Indian worlds, an imperial
dynamic all the more resistant to institutionalization.””

Empty Social Spaces

The particular-universal dialectic alone cannot explain the disorder asso-
ciated with the importation of Western political models. Weakened by the
effectiveness of identity mobilizations, the imported state suffers from a se-
rious deficit of citizenship imputable to its precarious legitimacy, its su-
perfluousness, and its political weakness. In the non-Western world, these
facts make the “empty social spaces” more important; these are the sectors
of society that the official political scene can neither mobilize nor control
and within which it deploys forms of substitute authority that garner indi-
vidual allegiances. The proliferation of these spaces tends also to diminish
the internal boundaries of the state, and to decrease and intersect the alle-
giance networks that integrate individuals.

These empty social spaces cover two principal sites of exclusion com-
mon to most non-Western societies: the rural world and the suburban
world. The first remains largely exterior to state rationality. When official
politics moves into it, it does so basically through clientelist relations, out-
side all institutional channels. The second is characterized by friction with
the state and an order of importation experienced as coercion and provo-
cation. The active and painful frustration of the second corresponds to the
passive and indifferent alienation of the first. Thus rural spaces substitute
other types of relations, such as communitary personal bonds or bonds
based on rank, for institutional political ones. In contrast, suburban spaces
privilege active identity-based mobilizations, relying on religious or mes-
sianic organizations to attract and manage allegiances, but also on neigh-
borhood associations and parapolitical networks.

The opposition between rural societies and urban ones is sufficiently
strong and too unfavorable to the former for there to be anything in im-
ported political modernity that would attract them or give them any reason
to align with it. The hypothesis of hybridization stands opposed to the no-
tion of complete alterity, which an entire school of thought formerly called
“dual society.””' But this idea deserves further clarification: while it is diffi-
cult to object that African rural spaces possess, as they do in South and East
Asia or in the Middle East, enough social resources to make a claim for self-
organization, to resist state takeover of its peasantry, and to oppose its own
political order to the state, it is also simplistic and deceptive to deny that

INTERNAL DISORDERS 187

communication between the two spaces exists. To the state, the rural soci-
ety adopts an attitude of pragmatic exteriority. Agricultural cooperatives of
Zimbabwean companies obstinately refuse to acknowledge the tutelage of
the political center, though they do not reject any material or technical help
the state provides. Similarly, the Casamance peasant [of southern Senegal]
will resist the creation of a local administration, though he does not reject
any possible benefits that can be mediated for him by traditional social
structures.” Even working alone, the individual is not above soliciting
chentelist relations in order to reconcile his participation in a local, au-
tonomous microsociety with his desire to obtain unilateral advantage. For
its part, the state does not consider itself defeated: aside from the entry of-
fered by patronage, it has been able to find here and there ways to compen-

sate for its weak penetration abilities by trying to restructure the local social

order. Its success has been uneven. From the half-failure of the agrarian

revolution attempted by Nehru in India to the land collectivization project
forged by ZANU during its struggles against lan Smith, numerous examples

illustrate the paralysis of political power against the rural society; agrarian

reforms undertaken by conservative princes (such as the shah of Iran in

1962) or progressive ones (such as Nasser’s in 1961) have shown even more

how perverse the effects of their actions were. Far from giving rise to a new,

reliable peasantry that would support the regime, these reforms only

brought out the indifference and even the distrust of social actors on whom

changes were forced by the political center, according to methods bor-

rowed, in the case of Iran, from Israel and the United States. These reforms

are nothing more than political initiatives unable to break through the pas-

sivity of rural populations toward the state; they fail to build a synthesis be-

tween the imported order and traditional rural society.

Confronted more directly with this importation, the suburban social
spaces, on the other hand, exclude themselves from institutional political
relations by producing active social movements and by initiating identity-
based mobilizations. It is here, in the suburban social spaces, that the
revivalist currents find their social base, even if the Turkish legislative elec-
tion of the fall of 1991 revealed that the Islamist-leaning Rifah party consis-
tently won in the central and eastern rural areas of Anatolia. Essentially,
however, the urban concentration of revivalism brings about another di-
mension of exclusion and another political use of “empty social spaces”: to
the microcommunitarian withdrawal effected in the rural area is opposed
the active and fervent identification with a counterlegitimacy. Beyond its re-
vivalist expression, this counterlegitimacy can assume a messianic and sec-

188 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

tarian form, just as it can support the rise of ethnic communities hoping to
strengthen themselves by seizing the essential elements of the politiciza-
tion process. In all these examples, the social spaces in question operate on
a formula of legitimacy that, by radically contradicting the imported state
order, leads neither to a partial integration nor to a competitive program-
matic production, but simply to the affirmation of an identity of substitu-
tion. On the level of political communalization, the “empty social spaces”
are still not filled. The resulting politicization supports neither the unifica-
tion of structures of authority nor their hybridization, nor evén the con-
struction of a substitute government.

It would, nevertheless, be imprudent to consider this rigid analysis of
“empty social spaces” sufficient and to categorize them simply as rural and
suburban societies. This would be a return to the developmentalist approach
that confuses political alienation with economic backwardness and erro-
neously opposes a participatory modern sector to a weakly civic traditional
one. But the construction of an imported state loosens allegiances even
within the new middle classes, whose formation and rise are directly linked
to the introduction of modern social roles as well as to the growth of the pub-
lic sector. Neopatrimonial logic solidly maintains an elite of upper-level civil
servants with many material and symbolic privileges, who ask for continual
improvement in its standard of living, and an increasingly stronger army of
lower-level civil servants, poorly paid and frustrated in their hopes of ad-
vancement in the spaces of modernity.”* The state so privileges the former
that they become the active importers of Western politico-administrative
models and abandons the latter, who join with unemployed intellectuals and
students with uncertain job prospects in radical protest and identity mobi-
lization. One can interpret in this way the interclass nature of revivalist
movements, such as the one characterizing the membership of messianic
sects or independent churches in Latin America and Africa. The sector of
modernity thus contributes to its own undoing, thus leaving room for new
empty social spaces.

The Populist Subterfuge

The erosion of support afflicting imported political models does not re-
semble just any process of political disaffection. Crystallized in terms of
identity, this erosion leads to a profound divorce between the governing
and the governed; it contests the formula of legitimacy on which the first
are based and creates conditions for revivalist conduct by which the second

INTERNAL DISORDERS 189

seek, in their own history or in a mythical and messianic representation of
their destiny, the sources of a legitimacy of substitution. In this context,
the princes possess only limited strategic options: to save their authority by
shoring it up with reinforced clientelism, or to manage their own formula
of legitimacy by drawing on whatever makes sense to those they govern.

The first approach seems increasingly risky. Urban growth makes the
patron-client relation fragile and ineffective, and the dismantling of the
upper class substitutes an emotionally based clientelism with one that is
considerably more anonymous, cold, and ineffective. The second solution
allows few accommodations. The examples of Morocco, Jordan, and Iran
show clearly that inserting traditional references into a policy of modern-
ization is not enough to hinder the identity-based reaction provoked by
efforts to import Western political models. The Latin American examples
indicate as well that the introduction of representative democratic proce-
dures and the advent of political competition are not enough to genuinely
involve a politically disoriented middle class and an unorganized working
class. Both of these classes experience the same political alienation that
separated them from the ruling class, to which they are linked by neither
the evocation of former social cleavages, nor the same emblematic vision of
democracy, nor the common invention of an endogenous modernity. These
impasses were at one time considered transitory and destined to disappear
as democracy became institutionalized; they were meant simply to force the
Latin American people to opt provisionally for populist strategies that, in
time, would be outgrown.

However, these strategies spread instead of disappearing. Latin America
confirmed them in essence as the durable way to organize relations between
leaders and people, as revealed by the disorderly return of Peronism to Ar-
gentina, the election of Alan Garcia and then Alberto Fujimori in Peru, as
well as the entrenchment of populism as a way to organize and orchestrate
most of the electoral campaigns. Similarly, numerous political systems in
Africa and Asia have guaranteed a genuine deepening of populism. Here,
cultural alienation is more marked than in Latin America, where the West-
ern referent is only partially perceived as external; the uncertainty burden-
ing the mobilization capacities of dominated or frustrated social categories
is reinforced by the essentially identity-based rejection of all models im-
ported from other cultures. Populism thus becomes an almost inevitable
technique of government, permitting the prince to reinsert himself into a
popular fabric from which his own role as importer of the state had ex-
cluded him.

Igo FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

This recourse could already be seen with Nasser and Sankara, with
Bhutto and Saddam Hussein; it subsequently grew in Central and Eastern
Europe as the Soviet Union declined. Relative to Peronism or Getulism, the
practice is managed but not eliminated. Fundamentally, it tries to remain
the same by creating a cadre in which the leaders try to govern by “system-
atically exalting a plebeian reference.” Its instrumental function has not
really been revised. The valorization of egalitarianism and of the national
cadre, the strongly orchestrated resumption of popular themes, the adroit
manipulation of traditional cultural attributes, are all meant to bond the
masses to the leader, to inscribe the popular sectors within a single politi-
cal axis that negates the reality of conflicts and counters any identity-based
reactive mobilizations as much as possible. In other words, populism is in-
creasingly imposed as a compensatory strategy. Faced with the imported
state’s lack of popularity and weak legitimacy, populism is meant to endow
the prince’s discourse and practice with at least some ability to attract and
mobilize.

The exacerbation of nationalism, the denunciation of hegemonies and
blocks, constituted a founding formula of classic populism. It is in the vig-
orous condemnation of imperialism that Nasser found the arguments to
support his role as tribune; it is in the back-to-back rejections of Russian
and American models and in the unified condemnation of their desires that
Indira Gandhi drew the most convincing elements of her populist dis-
course. It is especially by linking exterior hegemony with internal stagna-
tion that this entire orientation made sense and left the first generation of
populist leaders with sizable room to maneuver. The large importers of the
Western state model could also be the most pitiless critics of Western dom-
ination; the convergence of both these roles under the populist banner fi-
nally turned out to be functional enough for all concerned.

Since the 1980s, practice has called for a readaptation of the formula.
The exercise has become more perilous, even contradictory. Identity-based
mobilization has progressed such that it has annexed most of the populist
arguments. From modes of government, these arguments have become the
credible vectors of revivalist and messianic movements, creating danger-
ously exaggerated conditions. The rediscovery of identity goes very well
with the unearthing of old populist, social, and political traditions, just as
it does with literary traditions, notably in Eastern Europe, and religious
ones pretty much everywhere. At the same time, the increasing failure of
the imported state model makes populism a very delicate strategy for the
people: to remain coherent with the requirements of this formula, they

INTERNAL DISORDERS Ig!

must take increasingly greater charge of frustrations engendered by the
very functioning of the state; in order to strengthen his legitimacy, the
prince must organize the criticisms leveled at his own government appara-
tus. As a final aggravating circumstance, the exaltation of the nation and
the people’s rights must henceforth be balanced by respect for the adjust-
ment policies required by the IMF and the World Bank; consumerism and
egalitarianism must become compatible with the valorization of budgetary
necessities; and the theme of independence must itself be carefully watched
so it does not hinder the pragmatic search for foreign aid.

Under these conditions, the populist subterfuge turns out to be unques-
tionably less effective, and yet more indispensable than ever. The resulting
neopopulism seems to play upon its own contradictions to derive its basic
benefits. Latin American political life suggests that populism resides es-
sentially in its electoral sites, as if to allow the candidate a credit that he will
later have to spend. Argentina’s Carlos Menem and Peru’s Alberto Fuji-
mori clearly centered their campaign around populist themes, where the
defense of the disinherited and references to identity rivaled the celebra-
tion of Peronist symbolism, for Menem, and recourse to messianic visions,
for Fujimori. Once in power, both invested powerfully in the purest eco-
nomic liberalism: in March 1991, Domingo Cavallo launched a plan for the
“dollarization of Argentinean economy” and organized a vast privatization
movement, while on August 8, 1990, the Peruvian president had already
administered a “Fuji shock” inspired by the same principles. In both cases,
the populist equation was dangerously saved by Fujimori’s vociferous de-
nunciation of the corruption of which he accused his predecessor, Alan
Garcia, and three thousand of his collaborators, while Carlos Menem de-
cided to declare “war on corruption” when several in his own camp were
implicated in corrupt practices. The maneuver became unclear: populist
support is there only if the neopatrimonial system is in effect; in other
words, the formula is usable only if it denounces certain consequences of
the order that it is supposed to legitimize. In the short term, it serves the
prince not only at the expense of his entourage but also by undoing a part
of the power relations that support him.”°

Henceforth populism became a blend of equivocation and the last hopes
of mobilization. From a simple but coherent discourse, it transformed into
a rhetoric oscillating between the banal discourse of ornamentation and a
genuine refusal to deal with the situation. More generally, it tried to recon-
cile unpopular or liberalizing economic measures with the manipulation of
unanimist and plebeian symbols having no real effects on the production of

I92 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

public policy: after the political populism of Bourguiba, of Boumédienne,
or Chadli during the first years of his presidency, a verbal populism evolved
in Tunisia and in Algeria that led to policies of structural adjustment, the
privatization of commerce and credit, and increases in the prices of essen-
tial goods. Similarly, solidarities formed in the most diverse places, such as
formal explanations of economic failures that would directly diminish the
state’s credibility. Hence in June of 1990, in a very depressed socioeco-
nomic climate, Corazon Aquino launched her own political movement, Ka-
bisig, literally “arms locked together,” against protest mobilization by us-
ing themes of mutual help among classes.”° Elsewhere as well, an explicit
economic reorientation in Burkina Faso at the end of 1985 moved toward a
liberalization of investments and a decline in social welfare: a revolutionary
discourse colored by class struggle was followed by a moralizing rhetoric
that obscured social oppositions, developing themes redolent of messian-
ism.”’ This ornamental populism is not negligible, however: it constitutes
the last chance of legitimacy for governments that cannot count on a com-
munality of meanings able to bind the populace to them, nor on the per-
formance of a state with continually diminishing functional capacities, nor
on the mobilizing effects of programs shackled by the rigors of dependence
as well as by the decline of the great Western-imported ideologies. The glo-
rification of the Arab, Indian, or African peoples remains, in effect, the ul-
timate vector of mobilization when the “third-world” variations of social-
ism or nationalism lose their attraction and when the only viable debate
taking shape on the rubble opposes identity-based renewal to an imported
ideology of modernity. The populist ornament becomes simultaneously a
screen to mask this delegitimizing rupture and an exclusive source of sym-
bolic production organizing the word and image of the leader, his paternal-
ism, his national authenticity, and his status as tribune of the underprivi-
leged. Thus, in January 1984, Habib Bourguiba heard and understood the
food riots that drowned out the voice of Prime Minister Mzali.

Wherever it exists, this ornamental populism remains contained, be-
cause it can affect neither the rigor of public policies nor the orientation of
foreign policies: as Guy Hermet notes, this new realism makes even the
populist leader into an “illusion breaker.”*® This function is formidable,
since it brutally deprives the political practice it inspires of the basic bene-
fits it formerly enjoyed. The transgressor blinds the prince to the facts: by
freeing his tribunate from all constraints, the prince abandons the project
of reconciling it with austerity policies. Reference to the people and the un-
derprivileged, the glorification of national values, and the call for equality

INTERNAL DISORDERS 193

integrate his basic populist practices into an international system. The
leader hinges his mobilizing strategy on a militant denunciation of a world-
wide hegemony that makes him an exile among nations, as happened with
Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein. The rise of extremism is all the more intense
because this pure and difficult populist recomposition is no longer, as it
was during the time of [the] Bandung [conference] and nonalignment, part
of a bipolar and competitive international order where diplomatic pop-
ulism was both a legitimate refusal to choose and an associative strategy
that considered itself the bearer of counterpropositions.

Invention’s Share

Identity mobilization, particularist drift, deficits in citizenship, prolifera-
tion of empty social spaces, just like the populist response, do not produce
disorder only. They illustrate how importing practices “corrupt” the logics
they increasingly contradict. Where the imported product declares itself
universal, it increases particularism; where it claims to build a monopolis-
tic political order, it provokes the dispersion of social spaces; where it
wants to be rational-legal, it encourages a neopatrimonial management of
the state. Disorder makes sense only in relation to the target model and de-
sired syntheses. But does it allow the growth of innovative sites, of places
where the state’s failure is sufficiently patent to provoke the birth or the re-
birth of a new political order that would launch another adventure? Two of
these sites can be retained as possibilities, precisely in the interstices of a
failing state: local society and extrapolitical social networks.

Local society has always been favored by revivalists. For Hinduist move-
ments, decentralization and a return to the village unit are key elements
in their proposals. The justification for the panchayati-raj, a system of
government that assigns leadership of the village to a council of five eld-
ers, links the RSS program to an old tradition already followed by Ma-
hatma Gandhi as a counterbalance to the westernization of the Indian po-
litical order. This valorization is found everywhere that the Western state
model is denounced.” Significantly, in the nineteenth century, populist
thought constituted a central argument for protest against the new Balkan
states created after the breakup of the Ottoman empire: the Greek lon
Dragoumis criticized the new bureaucratic state, calling for a political-
administrative system founded on the local community; Serbian Slavo-
philes opposed the “natural” Slavic institutions to Western influences;

I94 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

Bulgarian populist writers stigmatized bureaucratic corruption, imputing
to it the decline of village life; the Rumanian poet Mikhail Eminescu saw
the true nation in peasant society, while his compatriot Constantin Stere
distinguished Western industrial society from Romania, which, he thought,
should keep a purely agrarian and decentralized basis in order to protect
its own personality. *°

This type of localism, which is both protest oriented and romantic, 1s ex-
pressed in Gadhafi’s criticism of urban society and his call for Bedouin com-
munitarianism as much as it is in the movements that, in Latiti America,
mobilize against the state in the name of messianism or revolution. Behind
the diversity of these occurrences, the defense of local society barely con-
ceals its program’s lack of focus. First of all, its visionary quality clearly pre-
vails over its capacities for invention, particularly in that its protests within
the urban fabric noticeably weaken the reference to village society, prefer-
ring instead a communitarian return to local life. Through their mobiliza-
tion efforts and their daily activities, Hinduist and Islamist movements, as
well as messianic sects, celebrate microcommunitarian solidarity and mu-
tual help ameng neighborhoods as much as the benefits of autonomy.

As events unfold, then, a localism praising a return to the land shifts to-
ward a much more political expression valorizing the principle of local au-
tonomy for the social actors. Those who protest against the imported state
are less and less apt to risk attacking industrial society or even modernity
itself. Rather, what comes under fire are the state’s claims to centrality and
the monopoly on legitimate physical violence. The argument is strategi-
cally very coherent, based as it is on a triple challenge: contrary to the
Western state, the imported state is essentially constructed from the top.
outside of any dealings with the periphery; its failure is largely due to the
difficulty of penetrating local society and surmounting the communitarian
resistance with which it reacts; and protest mobilization is all the more ef-
fective when it meets individuals’ expectations for microcommunitarian
integration. These elements make the localist reference the foundation of
an especially effective political strategy.

The value of this reference is, however, not exclusively instrumental, for
it can bring about innovation. The imported state has conquered the pe-
ripheral spaces in form only. The colonial administration itself not only
had to respect these autonomies but knew most of the time how to build on
them or, at least, to work with them. Premodern political systems had in no
way eliminated them, as the Western state has done vigorously since the
Renaissance. The Ottoman empire recognized for the ayan and even its

INTERNAL DISORDERS I95

own governors an autonomy that European bailiffs, seneschals, and stew-
ards had never enjoyed. The same freedom can be found in the Persian em-
pire, both under the Safavids (1502-1736) and the Qadjars (1794-1803), in
raj (India, and even in imperial China, where mandarins and nobles shared
the daily management of local society. In the Arab world, traditional polit-
ical systems were constructed on a complex combination of a more or less
institutionalized central power and a collection of autonomies recognized
in tribes and brotherhoods.*! The coexistence of a segmentary tribal order
and the sultanate was not rare, as the Kurds had until the end of the nine-
teenth century in their harmonious combination of scrupulous respect for
segmented autonomies and the unchallenged legitimacy of royal power.
None of these various potentialities were ever truly eliminated. When the
Ottoman empire abolished the power of the Kurdish emirs in order to com-
plete its conversion into a modern state, the sheykhs who were leaders of the
religious brotherhoods easily found their place and thus assured the contin-
ued existence of the structures of local autonomy beyond their institutional
dismantling.** Similarly, the failure of statist integration in sub-Saharan
Africa resulted in an ongoing reevaluation of the role of village notables in
order to make them indispensable agents for public policies and even titu-
laries of a true autonomous political power. Also, the very many political
conflicts, whether internal or external, some of which have been extremely
violent, reveal the disastrous effects of political projects that build them-
selves on the negation of local autonomies. This is what has occurred for
most of the civil wars in Africa. Behind the one that is destroying Somalia
can be seen the irreducible personality of the northern and southern clans,
each one incarnated in a different political party and playing its own pro-
grammatic card in order to better preserve its own autonomy. Thus the
-Hawiye, who constitute the base of the CSU, established themselves after
the overturning of Siad Barre (himself a Merehan) by publicly and officially
defending the idea of a national conference, in spite of opposition by the Ma-
jertein and the Ogodenis, grouped respectively in the FOSS and the MPS.**
These examples reveal evidence of a bifurcation between the European
state and the imported state: the first is made up of weakening resources in
the local society, whereas the second finds its real substance outside the lo-
cal society. Western society has clearly distinguished between countries
like England, where the local society was only very little undone and the
state remained weak, from those where the crisis of seignorial peripheral
power was sufficiently active to allow a real redeployment of the political
order. In the latter case, the state was continually strengthened by periph-

196 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

eral resistance, which it met in an unequal combat with the production of
new institutions that enriched it and created in the local society attitudes of
dependence and the demand for tutelage.

This stratagem is not exportable because the equality of powers 1s not at
all the same. Subsequently, pressures from the periphery produce a pro-
found redistribution of skills and possibilities for innovation. The difficulty
is twofold. As integrated parts of the protest process, pressures from the pe-
riphery lend themselves all too well to the tribunal processes that distance
them from the logic of innovation. Used by brotherhoods in Turkey and
Senegal, by messianic movements in the Andes, and the notables in sub-
Saharan Africa, these pressures are invariably cast as negative. Though oc-
casionally cast as an apology for the golden age, indeed the myth of the
Good Samaritan, localist visions still draw much too deeply on tradition to
be spontaneous bearers of innovation. Yet local society basically every-
where capitalizes on two important resources. The failure of the state and
development policies from above leaves it to local social groups to deal with
numerous initiatives, such as the reactivation of agrarian or health policies,
and the definition of relations with the NGO, or the setting up of coopera-
tives or savings networks. Moreover, faced with the imported state’s insti-
tutional rigidity, local society profits from its own suppleness in order to de-
fine new modes of individual political participation. The fervent search for
a democracy that would be local first and national second, that would be
based on a real allegiance of the people rather than a forced or artificial
identity of citizenship, is a theme embraced by intellectuals in Africa, the
Middle East, and Latin America. Similarly, the solution to identity-based
tensions that most often find no territorial expression seems deeply con-
fused with the reordering of local autonomies. This, in any case, is the
proposition most often advanced by Kurdish intellectuals and leaders who
hope to reconcile the need for identity affirmation and the difficulties pre-
sented by the construction of an independent and sovereign Kurdish state.

The rise of associative networks can also be considered a vector of innova-
tion.** The imported state’s weakness leads inevitably to the composition
or activation of social solidarities that escape political tutelage. The phe-
nomenon comes about first in the very interstices of the state, in places it
can neither reach nor fully control: mosque networks in Iran, the w/ema in
Indonesia, brotherhoods in Morocco, Senegal, the Sudan, and Turkey;
churches and Christian movements in Kenya, Burundi, and the Philip-
pines; monasteries and Buddhist associative networks in Burma and Viet-

INTERNAL DISORDERS 197

nam. Nor do religious entities monopolize this interstitial capital: the au-
tonomy enjoyed by the rural sector in numerous developing societies con-
fers on farming associations a strong ability to organize social interactions
in the agrarian milieu. Such is the case, for example, in Kenya and even
more so in Zimbabwe, where such associations have successfully defied
agrarian policies defined by the state and have established their own, au-
tonomous bases for a direct cooperation between blacks and whites.

At this level, the very logic of authoritarianism and neopatrimonialism
tends to reverse itself. The social actors are effectively confronted with a
choice that can not only break the vicious circle but seems eminently able to
destabilize the reigning state. In such a logic, the acquisition of power and
goods involves a strategy of collaboration with the political-administrative
order: to distinguish oneself from the state and create a civil society consti-
tutes a costly yet ineffective objective, since the state controls the principal
access to wealth. In this perspective, the chances for an economically au-
tonomous bourgeoisie to develop are slim, but the reproduction of a state
bourgeoisie seems to correspond to the rationally thought-out interests of
each individual that composes it. However, such a calculation is not univer-
sal and seems increasingly doubtful. First, as we have seen, it has never in-
cluded the “interstitial actors,” whose interest lies, like that of religious or
rural organizations, in applying a strategy of differentiation that will allow
them to subsequently capitalize on growing benefits. Furthermore, this
strategy will grow less and less interesting to the social actors who can con-
struct their own autonomy from the accumulation of resources they derive
from their functions as tribunes, their affiliation with transnational net-
works, or, most often, both of these. Thus it is, for example, with journalist
and jurist associations in several English-speaking countries in sub-Saharan
Africa, including the efforts in Nigeria of the Lawyers Association to oppose
the trying of cases involving political corruption before military courts.*°
Thus it is also with the role played by the Writers Association in the fight
against the shah’s regime in the years preceding the Islamic revolution, and
also with student associations in Egypt and Morocco, but also with unions
as, for example, that of the miners in Zambia. Finally, the poor results ex-
perienced by the imported state led it to increasingly disengage itself from
the public sector and to fragment, thus freeing up more new zones of socia-
bility. Beyond economic effects, the process has sociopolitical consequences
in places as different as the Maghreb and the Indian subcontinent, where it
led to a veritable dismantling of the bureaucracy. Such consequences have
made it useless to go through a state phase and to obtain the complicity of its

198 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

agents: the neopatrimonial strategy that fuses social actors with the politi-
cal space is challenged to such an extent that it avoids behavior that could
lead to the constitution of civil societies. Privatization, private enterprise,
the establishment of stock markets, as in Casablanca, and the proliferation
of savings banks move clearly in this direction.

Yet the convergence of all these facts does not lead clearly to the consti-
tution of a civil society. Horizontal networks of solidarity remain selective
in terms of the limited number of social actors, whereas others benefit from
the continuation of microcommunitary solidarities. Moreover, the rise of
an identity-based mobilization, which, as we have seen, increases aliena-
tion from the imported state, constitutes an obvious and probably lasting
hindrance to the establishment of a structured civil society. The success of
the associative peasant movement in Zimbabwe is doubly limited by con-
stituting itself essentially in the privileged framework of the village, where
it combines with microcommunitary solidarities, and by remaining obedi-
ent on the national level to influence from the ethnic cleavage between the
Shona and the Ndebele. Similarly, the associative network linking certain
liberal professions in Nigeria enters into play with ethnic solidarity and re-
ligious identity movements that can lead, as with the Maitatsine move-
ment, to messianic type mobilizations. In addition, this combination does
not lead to the disappearance of empty social spaces, but to their fulfill-
ment by movements that only secondarily aspire to integrate into a civil so-
ciety in which they would be only one entity among others. Neither revival-
ist religious organizations, nor messianic sects, nor identity movements
are disposed to a banalization that would mean the loss of their own speci-
ficity. Here we see the cultural alienation that is the primary hindrance to
the constitution of a civil society, making improbable the construction of a
market economy on the remains of the neopatrimonial order. This eco-
nomic upset could have opened another path leading to a structured and
differentiated civil society: the incessant progress of the informal economy
in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; rural enclaves; and the repeated failure
to individualize social relations—all reveal the improbability of reproducing
and universalizing a differentiation similar to that which grounded the
Western model of the market economy.

If innovation does not pass through a stage of autonomous civil society,
it can come about through a combination of the different mobilizing ac-
tions enumerated above. The local site and the associative site can also be
vehicles of invention in that they constitute two places where the individ-
ual experiences both a minimal political control and a maximal constraint

INTERNAL DISORDERS 199

on innovation: villages and networks are, in effect, of very little concern to
the state, but they must act urgently to meet daily needs. In this sense, the
distance and the inability of the political center are functional in that they
hasten the move toward autonomy. At worst, the simple fact of enduring is
already an invention, since it presupposes a very complex adaptation and
especially a calculated transgression of the universalist rules produced by a
center that cannot be totally ignored.

The difficulty lies, in fact, in the effort to confederate all these micro-
inventions into a coherent model of political invention, to pass from daily
innovation to the production of a mobilizing utopia at the level of the entire
society. The process is even more complex in that the progress of localism
tends to “ghettoize” innovations. The social actors who realize these inno-
vations on a daily level have no strategic interest in generalizing them. The
production of a utopia is thus abandoned to organizations that make the de-
nunciation of alienation the principal mark of their political action. The
utopia is thus moved toward a place—national or transnational-that lends
itself even less to invention. It is, moreover, taken over by a collective actor
whose strategic imperatives distance him triply from the work of sociopo-
litical innovation. Since he mobilizes through reference to identity, he con-
structs his discourse on praise of a tradition that defies history and social
change. Since he is interclassist and unanimist, he needs first not to be
countered by a too precise and too engaging programmatic production.
Since he denounces the noxious effects of an imported Western order, he
seeks to optimize his gains by mixing a normative and mobilizing discourse
with the language of the tribune. As Abdelkader Zghal correctly stated
about Tunisia, the success of Islam among the young depends on its ability
to address the problem of social injustices as well as that of cultural iden-
tity.*° Such an effort can be found in all identity movements, and separates
them from conventional partisan logic such as it appears in the most cur-
rent typologies in political science.

The resulting discourse is all the more difficult to attach to a problem-
atic of innovation because it federates by a moralizing rhetoric that reflects
all the virtues it seeks: it is normative, it denounces and denigrates the im-
ported order, it valorizes identity, it is unanimist and sufficiently imprecise
regarding concrete matters to be acceptable to all. In fact, it allows the uni-
fication of all social demands addressed to a suspect state that will be re-
jected regardless of its answers. Society is rethought through the minimally
compromising filter of a rigorous moral code abandoned by its corrupted
actors. But we learn nothing of what the state should be.

200 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

In fact, one can postulate that the question of modernity shares these or-
ganizations rather than reuniting them. Though Islamism wants to be
more revivalist than fundamentalist, and hypothesizes a modernity that
could reconcile with revelation and tradition, the debate over what mean-
ing should be given to this reconciliation remains. Whereas in the last cen-
tury the controversy over the created or uncreated nature of the Koran op-
posed those who believed in the adaptability of God’s word to history to
those who refused to even consider that possibility, the contemporary pe-
riod divides Islamists according to how they view the idea of a modern so-
ciety and the projects that accompany it. Thus Algeria’s FIS integrates,
around Benahdj, the salafists* who prioritize tradition and the Djeza’ara
school of thought that, centered around the petrochemical engineer Ha-
chani, militates for a genuine Algerian revolution that would bring about
another modern, national, and more just social order. The same opposition
in Iran distinguishes Khomeini from Talegani, as if all identity-based pro-
test, far from bringing an ideal model of the state, would erect the state into
an unresolvable debate.

Internal political interactions blur rather than promote the logics of in-
novation. The increasing power given to international considerations and
their growing interest by the social actors can henceforth be understood as
a search, at times conscious, at times unconscious, of ways to unblock the
system.

*Translator’s Note: The salafists were adherents of the salafiya, an Arab-Muslim
reformist movement that, at the end of the nineteenth century, advocated a return
to the original doctrine and the reconciliation of science and faith. This movement
is associated with a cultural renaissance in the Arab World.

6. International Disorders

Soca actors invest increasingly more in the international order because
of several factors: globalization of the economy, advances in long-distance
communication techniques, increased mobility of individuals, and the
crises of the nation-state. In response to numerous pressures from impor-
tation’s negative effects, the actors in non-Western societies deploy their
own strategy on the international scene, as if impossible internal innova-
tion activated a compensatory external movement. This is to say that the
results of such choices are potentially more symbolic than real: the result-
ing multiple factors have just as many remarkable destructuring effects as
those occurring internally; it is not unthinkable, however, that axes of in-
novation can derive from them.

The International Order’s Loss of Meaning

In this perspective, international disorder is twofold: in the beginning, it
relates to the destabilizing effects of importation logic; then later, it is ag-
gravated by the consequences of internal protest on the international
scene. The first of these phenomena is particularly extensive: the protest-
ing actor irrupts onto a scene that is already affected by a loss of meaning,
that is destabilized and challenged by the crisis affecting the universality of
political models. By reinforcing relations of uncertainty, this destabiliza-
tion increases the effectiveness of all protest practice: it helps us under-
stand the passage from the internal to the external and the crystallization

202 FAILED. UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

within international relations of sociopolitical tensions deriving from de-
pendence and from the diffusion of the Western model of government.

By leading to the crisis of citizenship allegiance, the failure of the im-
ported state supports the rise of more or less formal transnational inflows
that bypass state institutions and deliberately ignore their claim to monopo-
lize diplomatic and military functions. Identity mobilization lies in the cen-
ter of this process: uncertain in their allegiance to a state to which they feel
foreign, individuals invest in networks of transnational solidarity, where Al-
gerian citizenship competes with membership in the Islamic world, where
Liberian citizenship rivals identification with the Mandingo people, where
Ecuadorian citizenship is defied by an increasingly active insertion into net-
works of messianic sects. The usual exposure to inflows in transnational
communication, radio and especially television, to economic inflows gov-
erning production and consumption, and to eventual demographic inflows
tends to confuse the uniformity and exclusivity of the citizenship allegiance.

In this context, identities are increasingly supple and mobile. While mi-
crocommunitarian identifications are reactivated, the individual finds
himself simultaneously part of an often clashing plurality of spaces that rel-
ativize the gap between national and international. At the same time the
logic of multiple affiliations weakens citizenship affiliation and, in partic-
ular, lets the individual decide which affiliation to privilege and thus the
identity he will value in any given time or situation. In the context of the
Gulf War, the unemployed inhabitant of Cairo or the student in Casablanca
could, in fact, chose to define himself as a citizen of his own nation-state or
as a member of the Muslim community, whose solidarity Saddam Hussein
invoked. The reality of this choice is all the more vivid and dramatic in that
the individual participates directly in the construction of international re-
lations and that these relations are increasingly dependent on the makeup
of an extremely large number of microdecisions. As a result, the relations
of uncertainty increase drastically, and the states’ diplomatic decisions are
all the more risky because, in contrast to what is theoretically presupposed,
many partners are involved in the decisions. Unable to anticipate what all
the individual microdecisions will be, the states have no choice but to ig-
nore them or to underestimate their eventual effects. This, among other
events, explains the constant determination of the Western powers to con-
trol the various conflicts that fragment the Muslim world politically and
diplomatically and to discount all the forms of mobilization and transferals
of allegiances these conflicts produce among the people.

As James Rosenau has stated,’ this fluidity of allegiances counters the

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 203

diplomatic weapon with the increasingly strong resource the individual de-
rives from his quasi-sovereign decision to cooperate or not. Here we are
very far from the paradigms on which the classic theory of international re-
lations is based. Clearly, this renewal does not come solely from the indi-
rect effects of dependence and the forced universalization of the Western
model; it is particularly strongly stimulated by the increase in transnational
inflows that reveal other logics, such as the choices made by economic ac-
tors who, in deciding whether or not to cooperate in effecting an embargo,
support or reject a diplomatic decision taken by the so-called sovereign
states. The same process and the same effects have occurred in numerous
other transnational relations that carefully circumvent states and at the
same time attack their sovereignty: the drain or transfer of capital, varia-
tion in manpower, the brain drain, informal economic progress, and the
diffusion of images and sounds, of cultural and artistic media. In each of
these cases, the strategy decided upon by the private actors is crucial, for
they leave the state little influence while conferring upon the individual
the role of international actor.

Yet between this upset and the forced universalization of the Western
model, deep bonds exist that, from several points of view, unify them. The
processes of westernization hasten this change because they weaken the
abilities of the peripheral states, because they accelerate, as we have seen,
the relativization of citizenship allegiances, and also because they have the
unusual effect of reactivating transnational cultural actors. The political vis-
ibility of Islam, of Hinduism, of the Catholic Church in Africa, of the Or-
thodox Church in Eastern Europe and the Lutheran Church in Central Eu-
rope, and their actualization as transnational forces have much to do with
the call of empty social spaces linked to the bankruptcy of imported states.
More deeply, the decrease in importation strategies and their apparent prof-
itability in the search for power and material advantages encourage the elite
in non-Western societies to intensify transnational inflows, to integrate into
these inflows, or even to provoke new ones. The Meiji period in Japan, the
rise of nationalism in India’s Congress, the first reform movements that af-
fected the Ottoman empire, Egypt, and Persia, instigated the first transna-
tional inflows toward these regions and inaugurated numerous individual
strategies to diversify them: official missions and especially private travel;
study abroad; membership in clubs or transnational vocational groups,
whether the Freemasons or the old Oxford networks; conversion to Western
religions, as in Africa, or though more limited, the Christian missionary
groups in China, Persia, and India; the creation of colleges modeled on

204 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

those in Europe; the opening of hospitals or various technical centers mod-
eled after Western cooperatives; and the establishment of branches and rep-
resentatives of foreign businesses controlling a considerable portion of the
interior market. Finally, to the extent that these practices hamper internal
innovations, they have helped considerably to amplify and generalize the
logic of inflows: initially sector-based, these practices increasingly encom-
pass the whole of sociopolitical activity, with the importers supporting ide-
ological and institutional models and thus stimulating the inflow of ideas
and thought, but also of norms and juridical techniques.” “

Since it is present in the early stages of transnational flows, the univer-
salization of the political model is also stimulated by strengthening com-
munication media. The ability to receive television programs from France 2
in Tunis, to be exposed to Radio Free Europe broadcasts from the popular
democracies during the cold war, the ease with which video cassettes circu-
late, cheaply and ubiquitously, constitute some of the many other examples
of effective vectors for massive diffusion of cultural models. The rupture is
even striking in a more recent time, when importation affected only a small
elite who made it the mark of their distinction and who cultivated, relative
to the masses, the exclusivity of its contact with the West: even in the 1930s
this role could be played by few travelers, polyglots, and those who fre-
quented the Curiel bookstore or a small number of salons in Cairo, the
French Club in Teheran, or the learned societies in India.

This change in scale quite obviously amplified the importation of West-
ern models by giving them access to the masses and by no longer orienting
them exclusively toward the reform of institutions and places of power, but
more and more toward the transformation of individual behavior. Yet such
ruptures gave rise to new disorder and extra tension more than they gen-
uinely harmonized social relations within the importing country. Two con-
tradictions appear, in fact, in the wake of this fully expanding international
communication: the clear weakening of the non-Western states’ mastery
over changes in the media, and the formation of a potential international
public prey to anomie and thus to unpredictable behavior.

The principle of state sovereignty already appeared too fragile when im-
ported political theories applied it to peripheral political systems whose cul-
tures did not always conform to intellectual constructions of Western con-
stitutional law and whose real functioning, in particular, revealed the marks
of dependence and clientelism. The same principle collapses completely
when we establish that the capacity of media production in non-Western
countries can no longer rival, on their own territory, those arriving from

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 205

abroad.* Three press agencies—AFP, Reuters, and AP—have a quasi-monop-
oly on the circulation of information; the United States alone controls most
of the distribution of cassettes and films; cable and satellite usage promotes
the almost infinite extension of media diffusion. Remarkably, it is by re-
course to a strict usage of the constitutional principle of sovereignty and a
rigorous reading of international public law formulated by Western jurists
and practitioners that African and Asian states have protested these prac-
tices, thereby revealing the contradiction. As of September 1973, the Con-
ference of Non-Aligned States held in Algiers demanded the collective ap-
propriation of communication satellites and, three years later in Delhi,
called for the creation of a pool of press agencies able to balance the flow of
information put forth by the Western agencies; in October 1976, at the re-
quest of UNESCO and under pressure from African and Asian countries,
Sean MacBride wrote a report in which he recommended the formulation of
national communication policies in each of the developing countries, the
respect for cultural identity, and a wide diffusion of scientific and technical
information, notably toward the least advantaged sectors of the population.

The following year in Nairobi, a vigorous debate in the context of UNESCO

saw the United States pitted against those who, following the Tunisian Mas-
mudi, claimed a new era in information: the argument of freedom advanced
by the former was echoed by that of sovereignty in the very definition of
what a people can know . . . and not know.‘ The evolution is, in fact, signif-

icant: it shows just how extensively the governing elite in an importing state

can reconcile its client status with its function as leaders. As it happens, the

communication debate also reveals a contradiction and an impotency: the

contradiction in a logic of state clientelism that cannot go so far that it com-

promises the government’s chance for minimal control of socialization—and

thus political education—of the people; the impotency of peripheral states

that cannot abolish the inflow of tutelary communication, widely concern-

ing, moreover, rather far-flung private actors, who in any case lack both the

attributes of international partnership and any reason to subject themselves

to the discipline of the desired new order.

The international public constituted in such a manner is far from re-
flecting media diffusion. The effectiveness of the Western cultural model
at influencing the masses without rival and abolishing national borders or
cultural boundaries is far from being an undisputed fact. The related hy-
pothesis of a unified international public opinion regarding the large com-
mon categories is equally unfounded. The functionalist hope has been dis-
appointed: There is no unified cultural code corresponding to a global

206 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

international system; quite the contrary, for the complex experience of
transnational inflows of communication confirms that the importation of
Western political models has more to do with a conscious strategy of actors
and that it in no way corresponds to the image of a growing wave that would
submerge the entire world equally.

Studies on Iran have shown that receptivity to media messages was es-
sentially selective, that they penetrated to the interior of the society rather
than unified the society under the banner of a communication mass struc-
tured in the West. The sensitivity to musical programs from Los Angeles or
London essentially affected the elite who had already become, socially and
professionally, importers of Western models of modernity. Even more, in
Iran as in Nigeria, the penetration of external inflows reactivated primarily
the traditional channels of communication used by other social categories.
In the case of Iran, the process was very beneficial to the mosques, to the
hayat who gathered a small number of faithful in private places, especially
during Ramadan or Muharram (the monthlong celebration of the martyr
Hussein), but also the bazaar and its mazes: so many places where informa-
tion and the cultural message were all the more legitimate precisely be-
cause they opposed those media made suspect by their cultural inaccessi-
bility. In the case of Nigeria, the establishment after 1960 of radio and
television based on the BBC, managed and developed by BBC-educated na-
tionals, resulted in a failure intensified by the coexistence of 178 languages
in the national territory. Henceforth, it reached only a small westernized
elite, who as a result, were even further cut off from a populace that had no
other choice than to confirm its communitarian growth and to sustain its
traditional channels of communication by returning the role of gongman to
a new generation of youth.”

The media imperialism thesis is too simple and thus inadmissible, as is
that of the “universal village” postulated by the constitution of a world cul-
ture. Rather than the formerly accepted image of an object such as a ball
launched in one direction, the more convincing and currently accepted im-
age of the boomerang describes the failure of a media inflow that turns
against those who transmit it and that encounters the obstacle of identity
and the will of the receiver.° The resulting recomposition is as familiar as it
is deceptive: it mixes, as occurs in the daily life of African or Asian towns,
the debris of exogenous cultural flow—jeans or Coca-Cola—with a system of
meaning that continues to provision itself from without; it distinguishes
socially and culturally two worlds within each of the non-Western societies,
two positionings defined precisely by reference to the usage of these in-

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 207

flows. This opposition, often too fragmented to be politically sustainable,
clearly gives rise to populist strategies of reappropriation: in India as in
Latin America, traditional culture is associated with the media and en-
couraged politically in such a way as to inflame the allegiance of the receiv-
ing public and to prevent the traditional culture from serving the ends of
protest activity. Thus cultural neonationalism is henceforth more political
than social and, in turn, distinguishes between the political elite and the
socioeconomic elite who see no advantage for themselves in it.’

All this reveals that the resulting international construction is particu-
larly complex and unpredictable. The actors move into the international
scene, where obstacles abound and cultural inequalities create the condi-
tions for a growing disorder. On one hand, the inflow of information re-
mains produced, organized, controlled, and diffused essentially from the
Western world, unilaterally, placing the non-Western actors in a situation
of dependence, rupture, and, even worse, weak communication with their
own citizens. On the other hand, cultural inflow, failing to constitute an in-
ternational public, paradoxically fuels the reconstruction of particularisms
and feeds identity movements. More seriously, instead of a unified or at
least a homogeneous public, different publics nourished on particularism
are formed that everything conspires to bring onto the international scene:
the growing visibility of international factors responsible for their frustra-
tions; alignments more or less marked and more or less accepted by their
own governments along the lines of Western-fabricated institutional and
normative models; and the increasingly obvious and established impossi-
bility of initiating solutions and responses to social, economic, and political
stakes that emerge on the interior political scene. Moreover, this interna-
tional mobilization is all the more aleatory because it is not governed—nor
is it governable—by any institutional authority; further, it gives rise to un-
certain cultural schemas, formed of references to identity and of various el-
ements taken from the repertoire of Western modernity. In that, it simul-
taneously limits the sovereignty of states that have less and less hold over
the international conduct of their populations and represents a new factor
of uncertainty for the international order.

This logic of disorder is all the more fearsome because it deprives the
state of everything that could validate it as a reliable international actor and
a fortiori everything that would make it an international actor hierarchically
superior to all other actors. Three foundations of the state’s diplomatic ac-
tion are thus imperiled: its claim to sovereignty, its function as guarantor of
security, and its demand for the exclusivity of international partnership.

208 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

State sovereignty is breached at several levels: clientelism, economic de-
pendence, cultural dependence, and the deficiency of citizenship already se-
riously affect the non-Western states; the rise of transnational currents
hamstrings all states indiscriminately, keeping them from any chance of
power. More seriously, by provoking a clear divorce between state and soci-
ety, the processes of forced westernization free up internationally social
spaces, identity groups, and collective actors and populations on which
no political sovereignty can be truly exercised. The observation concerns,
though unclearly, the acquisition of an international personality by all the
elements that detach themselves from a state order suffering directly from
this divorce: Lebanese clans; tribes in Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Li-
beria; Muslim religious minorities; Sikhs in India; Berber linguistic mi-
norities in the Maghreb; Kurds in the Middle East; the overlapping of peo-
ples in Eastern Europe, but also the Islamist community in Egypt and
Algeria, brotherhoods in Turkey, the diaspora of the Chinese in Southeast
Asia or the Lebanese in Africa, informal economic networks of merchant
elites, social movements of the unemployed, youth or rural migrants in Ara-

bic population centers, and so on. All these reflect social processes that are

neither intrinsically modern nor essentially traditional, and which are to be

distinguished from phenomena of transnationalization linked to the in-

creasing intensity of global exchanges: in reality, they are born by the very
failure of their integration into the heart of a state-controlled institutional-

ized order. The international scene is thus dotted with spaces of power that

sometimes overlap on the same territory, sometimes extend beyond that

territory. In its bankruptcy and failures, the diffusion of the model of the

state frees up a great many scraps of sovereignty that escape the state,

weaken its capacity, and decrease the effectiveness of its attempts to re-

spond diplomatically. Similarly, the increasing shrinkage of state sover-

eignty reduces the area reachable by the policies of cooperation the patron-

state attempts. Intergovernmental clientelism thus loses a good part of its

efficacy and especially of its effect on the societies concerned, to remain

only an instrument that reproduces links between the governors of the

North and the governed of the South.

Similarly, this logic of disorder separates the state even more from its secu-
rity function. This function played an active role in state order, since it also
legitimized its existence and organized its action both internally and inter-
nationally, and very effectively, since no institution rivaled it in this func-
tion. The secondary effects of forced universalization on the Western model

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 209

do not alone explain the threats to this logic; they do, however, play a sig-
nificant role, as do all the other processes that contribute to the dismantling
of the state. On one hand, the reactivation of microcommunitarian solidar-
ites leads individuals to seek within their community the security that they
should have sought from the state. On the other hand, and particularly so,
spaces of sovereignty that the state can no longer claim for itself seek more
vigorously to control autonomously their own violence. The takeover by re-
vivalist movements of Hindu or pan-Islamic communitarianism amounts to
a transferal of the instruments of legitimate violence: processions by the
BJP in the streets of Baghalpur and Hyderabad publicize their claim to pro-
tect the Hindu community from the intentions ascribed to the Indian Mus-
iim community as much as to the Muslim world in its entirety; as vectors of
a dissemination of violence, they promote community integration, but they
also discourage the rival community and persuade it to abandon the posi-
tions it occupies. It is significant that Hyderabad community uprisings
cause Muslims to flee; their properties are then bought cheaply by the pro-
moters of the Hindu community; it is also revealing that, in this type of mo-
bilization in India, Africa, and the Muslim world, but also in the community
uprisings in large Western cities, militants and sympathizers find them-
selves involved with an underworld for whom violent collective action is a
way to express its marginality and its role as social deviant.®

What is true internally is doubly so internationally. First, communitarian
violence grows in intensity as it crystallizes around international objec-
tives, whether it concerns the denunciation of pan-Islamism in India, or
the “privilege” accorded to Western targets in the uprisings afflicting
African, Maghrebian, or Middle Eastern cities. In particular, the inability
of many groups to realize their ends in conformity with the model of the na-
tion-state tends to transfer their action onto the international scene and to
thus further disseminate violence. The inability to deal with Kurdish, Ar-
menian, Palestinian, or Lebanese issues through solutions offered by the
state structure has hastened the conversion of organizations that attempt
to deal with them into international actors opting deliberately for a strategy
that seeks its effectiveness in an increase of violence within the world com-
munity. Hence solidarity grows between the denunciation of a Turkish,
Iraqi, Israeli, or Christian Lebanese order and an international system pre-
sented as collectively responsible. In a more prudent and less radical man-
ner, the increasingly numerous liberation movements seek acceptance of
their own use of violence through international recognition. Henceforth, a

2TO FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

decisive part of international interactions consists of changing intergov-
ernmental relations into relations among actors who possess a violence suf-
ficiently credible to achieve legitimacy: Max Weber’s thought regarding
the state is here inverted and, with it, the entire conception of security that
founded the diplomatic-strategic international order.

Last, this entire process cannot fail to rebound onto the Western state itself.
Can this process work indefinitely if the international order evolves to mod-
ify its diplomatic actions so much as to make its interlocutors into actors un-
affiliated with the state? The state order postulates universality and mo-
nopoly: the system created by the Peace of Westphalia inaugurated an order
in which the states were stronger and more institutionalized to the degree
that they dealt only with other states: this reciprocity is not respected when
a Western state must negotiate with nonstate organizations for the release
of hostages, for the non-use of terrorism, or respect for its territory, all of
which occur frequently in negotiations that imply an infringement upon the
actions proper to the legal state. More generally, in churches and other re-
ligious organizations, in cultural actors, and all identity-based countermo-
bilization movements, state diplomacy encounters so many partners that it
could dominate only at the risk of losing its own legitimacy.

This disorder is finally completed by the breakdown of the international dis-
course from non-Western societies, within which several different logics
conflict in a more or less organized manner. The discourse of the institu-
tional elite, in principle the only one able to result in diplomatic action,
meets competition from the many actors who control the extreme diversity
of mobilizations and expressions of identity: religious, ethnic, economic,
and demographic networks possess a foreign policy and an active presence
on the international scene that does not necessarily acquiesce to the state.
As for the state, from it derives a diplomatic voice that speaks on at least
three, often contradictory, registers whose coexistence eliminates a good
part of its meaning and its normative coherence. First, the non-Western
state can, through its diplomacy, haughtily espouse the practices and norms
of international relations as they were fashioned by the European system.
The states of the Muslim world have given many proofs of their realist con-
ception of international relations, frequently invoking the jurisprudence of
international law more quickly than the Islamic counterpart; some of them
have refused to sign the Geneva convention on the law of the high seas, bas-
ing their position not only on the argument of cultural uniqueness, but on

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 211

that of state sovereignty, which is not respected sufficiently in the final doc-
ument.’ Similarly, African states frequently call upon the principle of state
succession to zealously defend the inviolability of their borders, as much
from external claims—as with Chad in its relations with Libya, Somalia with
Kenya or Ethiopia—as from secession movements, such as Nigeria and the
Biafra issue or the former Belgian Congo with the former Katanga. There is
a remarkable flood of solicitations with international institutions by African
and Asian governments, as occurred with the Saharan question, or that of
Kashmir, or the Iran-Iraq conflict over the Chatt-al-Arab. The Islamic Re-
public knew how to utilize its most astute experts in international law to
actively negotiate a settlement in its dispute with the French government,
relying when necessary on numerous precedents clearly drawn from a West-
ern-wrought juridical repertoire.

At the same time, however, these very states wisely build a diplomatic dis-
course and practice that nourish their own particularism, fabricated for
the occasion into a legitimate source of law. It is precisely the illegitimacy
of a border drawn by Western colonization that authorizes the Iraqi state
to challenge the existence of Kuwait; it is the same arbitrariness de-
nounced by the Moroccan state to emphasize the artificiality of Western
Sahara, as it was formerly to reject the existence of Mauritania in the name
of the traditional institution of the sultanate and thus a fundamentally
nonstatist political order. It is also a two-thousand-year-old tradition that
creates uncertainty around the border between China and Vietnam, for
China traditionally declared its neighbors to the south as border peoples
and refused to recognize the dividing line as a “border between two equal
states.” Constructed and institutionalized by France, this border thus be-
came an essentially colonial production, a Western formalization of an old
institution that was much more complex, allowing ambiguities and fragili-
ties to exist, thereby maintaining a duality of discourse where juridical
formalism and particularist cultural references alternated with each other
in order to justify diplomatic and military challenges. The same happened
with relations between Vietnam and Cambodia, where a similar formaliza-
tion produced comparable effects: the extraordinarily complex relations
between the Khmer and Champa kingdoms reflected an impossible car-
tography and a conception of alterity difficult to grasp in an interstate cul-
ture; the administrative boundary markings required by the colonialist
power ignored the extreme subtlety of the notion of limits, thus encourag-
ing, particularly in Vietnam, a double practice that drew from both the

212 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

repertoire of the succession of states and that of protest in the name of his-
torically ambiguous borders.”

Finally, the critique of the international order incites the states who en-
gage in it to draw from a third normative repertoire, that of the world of the
excluded and disinherited. The discourse of exclusion replaces that of par-
ticularism without, however, becoming confused with it: the international
order is not rejected because it falsely claims universality, nor because it de-
stroys histories not inscribed in the Western trajectory; rather, it is de-
nounced as the producer of domination and thus exclusion. The word of
the state victimized by this discourse is, for this reason, necessarily deroga-
tory with respect to the norm: to international order is opposed justice; to
formal equality between states is opposed the inequality between the haves
and the have-nots. In a critical conception of justice similar to that elabo-
rated by John Rawls, the state tends to valorize a particular law destined to
balance its lateness, and that, as such, negates the classic enunciation of an
international order presupposing strict equality among sovereign states."!

The state of exclusion is itself complex and multifaceted. It is based on
a superposition between nonmembership in the Western order and the
exclusion from international resources of power, whether that power has
to do with economic, social, or political resources. Inequality can be eval-
uated in terms of debt, the GNP, poverty statistics, the development of
sanitary or educational infrastructures, and the capacity to control and in-
fluence innovation. In this respect exclusion relates not only or even nec-
essarily to poverty but also to the transfer of technology, the eventual in-
ability to fully and autonomously use products of modernization, and to
organize the passage from previous conditions to the conditions of mo-
dernity: the example of the Gulf states reveals a situation of exclusion
made from the forced importation of engineers and technicians, from de-
pendence on others for food-stuffs, banking activities, and weapons. The
control of innovation also concerns the capacity to control the production
of institutions and ideologies: dominating technological innovation, of-
ten more successfully than others, Japan only partially controls the mech-
anisms to construct its own political modernity. Finally, the phenomenon
designates the capacity to dominate international political choices, and
to influence the evolution of stakes and conflicts that implicate each of
the states: the exclusion from international decision making affects un-
equally an entire hierarchy of states whose role goes from that of almost
total effacement before an international interaction that completely tran-

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 213

scends them to an alignment of diplomatic positions that quite obviously
are imposed on them, such as what Europe and Japan experienced during
the Gulf War.

On this account, very few states totally escape exclusion. The discourse
it inspires has, however, a considerably more restrained influence and af-
fects only those states for whom exclusion creates not only a real and con-
scious frustration but also leads to such deprivations that they find them-
selves very obviously relegated to the periphery of the international
system, stuck in a dominated position.

The same situation prevails both internationally and internally: the ac-
tors denounce a situation only when they accumulate the negative effects
with no hope of even minimal benefits. Thus partial exclusion—from which,
however, a state like Japan suffers greatly—does not produce a discourse that
deviates from the international norm: at most, one observes the attractive
effect of this type of discourse in certain categories that remain in the mi-
nority and that enrich Komeito. At the same time, when this exclusion be-
comes systematic, when it sensitizes large sectors of the population, but also
a large portion of the frustrated elite, and combines with an atmosphere of
cultural alienation, it frequently inspires a discourse of global protest
against the international order and will potentially find multiple echoes and
active support within society. Reconstructing the stakes of internal politics
in terms of international politics and conceiving internal failures in terms of
external responsibilities become attractive for certain political organizers.
At this level, the forced westernization of the international order favors
powerfully the credibility of the discourse of denunciation and hastens the
emplacement of a new diplomatic enunciation, which becomes that of the
disinherited.

In such a context, uncertainty is twofold. On one hand, the international
actors must wait to see the evolution of their non-Western partners among
three, often contradictory roles that they choose according to these con-
junctions: the alignment in terms of the classic interstate structure, the
militant reference to their own system of meaning and their own history,
and the demand for rights linked to their role of disinherited. On the other
hand, the non-Western actors must continuously seek to reconcile each of
these formulas and to withstand competition from those who, in their own
country, militate for a more tribunal international strategy. In this increas-
ingly anarchic distribution of roles among actors, the international order
loses a good part of its meaning, whereas its efforts to achieve uniformity
aimed at the opposite goal.

214 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

Strategies of Disorder

One can, henceforth, postulate that certain actors try to take advantage of
this disorder to realize benefits that the interstate structure cannot offer
them. Non-Western diplomacy has for a long time oscillated between the
strategy of clientelism and that of nonalignment, which were both func-
tional for the international system: the first reinforced a relation of state to
state by reconciling it with relations of domination; the second furthered
the political and diplomatic action among the Southern states according to
practices that drew liberally from the repertoire of public international law
and that were largely inspired by a vision of the state, politics, the national,
and nationalism clearly borrowed from the West. In addition, this third or-
der-or this “third world” —fit almost perfectly in the system of peaceful co-
existence, knowing how to play more or less adroitly off the rivalries be-
tween superpowers for their own advantage. Until recently, the code of
international relations thus remained unified.

Currently, international disorder incites certain actors to step out of
this codification. The coincidence between cultural alienation and exclu-
sion makes it very rational to use the emblem of a “dominated culture” as
a weapon against the “dominant states.” In the clientelist relation, as in
the workings of nonalignment, references to non-Western cultures stayed
discreet; often even logic led one to censor them in order to privilege a sec-
ular construction of politics. In a context where disorder leads to a mobi-
lizing reactivation of cultural emblems, confrontation can take an entirely
different configuration. The Gulf War shows how, at any moment, a pop-
ulist leader can risk defying the world of states, its laws, codes, values, and
actors by inscribing his diplomatic action in another register, one entirely
exterior to the classic relations among states. Saddam Hussein believed he
could win by opposing a protest-based international order to the official in-
ternational order, resources linked to cultural solidarities to the mobiliza-
tion of state-based resources, and the order of the disinherited to the order
of domination.

Such a diplomacy is certainly not totally new: decolonization and non-
alignment, and certain more recent conflicts such as Vietnam, had already
begun a functional and mobilizing usage of imperialism and its denuncia-
tion. Yet this prelude had not truly shaken the old order: the Suez or Viet-
nam crises followed the explicit and implicit rules of peaceful coexistence.
The subsequent rupture revealed several new elements: the word and ac-
tion of the dominated were henceforth inscribed in their own repertoire

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 215

and not that of the international community; they aimed at confederating
the disinherited rather than building a new order; in particular, the gain
sought could no longer be measured in terms of power or the accumulation
of state resources, but in the capacity to mobilize and destabilize. In other
words, we see spreading in the international space what could already be
detected within non-Western societies: rather than seek power directly,
countermobilization movements sought first to establish a protest-based
political order that they could prove was more legitimate than the official
political order.

The transposition worked out with this strategic schema can seem re-
munerative for any prince confronted by a series of failures that become
well known: the inability to mobilize the governed around a culturally
exogenous state; the difficulty of circumventing the revivalist countermo-
bilizations that went into action within the society; the impossibility of de-
fying the international powers on their own territories; and the precari-
ousness of the advantages received from interstate clientelism or from the
practice of nonalignment. All these blockages, both internal and external,
led those involved to compensate for growing political incapacity by vocif-
erous protest on the international scene: the dominated actor substitutes a
tribune strategy for a power strategy, thereby seeking an entirely different
usage of conflict. He who goes this route no longer tries, as the classical
theory of international relations would predict, to increase his own power
or to reduce that of another, but to obtain dividends from his role as tri-
bune. The conflict is no longer a dead end, because his losses on the inter-
state scene can theoretically be compensated for by advantages acquired by
the mobilizing capacity of the people.”

Of course, the precedent set by the Gulf War casts doubt on the whole
idea: Iraq’s war costs clearly outweigh the gain made in mobilization of the
people, which were less strong than Iraq’s president had hoped, but still
much more significant than Western diplomats admitted. Nevertheless,
this conflict reflected a big step, since, for the first time, the protest war oc-
curred in its entirety: an actor took the risk of engaging in a conflict where
military and diplomatic defeat were certain, with a goal, not to win, but to
effect a protest. This objective was largely met, since the promotion of
Iraq’s cause rallied all the protest movements in the region: diverse Pales-
tinian organizations, Maghrebian social movements, Pakistanis or Bangla-
deshis, and especially Algerian, Tunisian, Jordanian, and Sudanese Islamist
movements all chose alignment with Baghdad over Saudi aid. Similarly, the
sensational conversion of the Iraqi Ba’ath to a militant Islamic identity

216 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

shows the rapidity with which cultural alienation can supply identity-based
emblems to protest wars; it also reveals the extreme mobility of calls for in-
ternational engagement and the facility with which the solicitation of the
citizen’s engagement can be replaced by other engagements that clearly di-
verge from the state."

From this perspective, the break is profound: from an international or-
der constructed on the mode of universality, we slide clearly toward an ex-
ploded order that mixes different and contradictory repertoires. In addi-
tion, the actors play on this plurality to acquire new advantages, whereas
earlier the Asian and African states acceded to international relations only
by means of the Western repertoire of diplomatic action, by conforming to
ideological models found there as well and, in order to be heard, by exag-
gerating their claims to a stronger state and a greater sovereignty. This
cultural explosion of the international system increased in turn the exter-
nal function of all mobilizations that, within each society, made reference
to an identity discourse. The communitarian uprisings in India, prose-
lytism by Protestant groups in South America, the progress of African
Muslim brotherhoods, just as the Islamist mobilizations in Maghreb, in
Machrek, or on the Indian subcontinent increasingly integrate an inter-
national enunciation of their action and thus a management of their in-
ternational relations. Continuity and rupture appear here quite clearly:
religious and sectarian mobilization develop in Latin America wherever
guerrillas loyal to Castro are no longer successful; the transnational rele-
vance of Islamist movements and engagements from which they benefit
now occupy the place left empty by Nasserian nationalist diplomacy; and
the active production of a militant vision of the foreigner—Muslim or
Western—is substituted—in India—for the mobilizing effects of Congress’s
“third-world” diplomacy. All these new elements, taking over in their own
fashion the old frustrations or exclusions, can do nothing more than, in
time, consecrate a new international life: either because these new mobi-
lizations have already, as we have seen, a direct international effect, or be-
cause they constrain the heads of state, and thus limit and shape their own
diplomacy, or finally, because they cause some of them to change modes
and divest themselves of their diplomatic instruments in exchange for re-
sources linked to this new type of action.

The constraint of diplomacy appeared clearly during the Gulf War, in
Pakistan, Morocco, and Tunisia. The first two had sent a contingent to the
anti-[raq coalition, while subsequent popular opinion favored the opposite
position, which caused Pakistan to be more discreet in its war efforts and

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 217

the Moroccan government to support the January 1992 demonstrators. As
for Tunisia, pressure from Islamist movements caused it to refrain from
taking a position or even attending the Arab League meeting that was to is-
sue a condemnation of Iraq. The substitution effect allows us to interpret a
large portion of Iraqi diplomacy, but it already clearly appeared in [ran’s
confrontation with the United States in the first years of the Islamic Re-
public. The complexity of Iranian diplomacy has to do with the fact that
Iran knew, much more than Libya, how to combine the tribune function
with a realistic approach to state action; it also knew how to federate the
disinherited by playing off rivalries between the USSR and the United
States, and by profiting as well from the possibilities offered by state-to-
state bilateral cooperation. The reconstitution of Iran as both a regional
power and a transnational force of protest fits right into the two present di-
mensions of the international order, and in a way that it hopes will maxi-
mize its Own gains.

By this very action, the function of a tribune for the “disinherited” —to
use a term originally from the Koran—projects within the international
scene the elements of its own characteristic rationalism, and thus becomes
an essential component of international interaction. Basing itself on pro-
test and not power, on horizontal solidarities and not national interest, this
function comes as much from the instruments as from the ends of classical
international action. For this reason, it aims neither at negotiation as an in-
termediate objective, nor at international integration as a final objective.
Negotiating is only one mode of expression, only one way to give voice to
the causes one shepherds. To link Kuwait’s liberation with that of Palestine
is not the same as negotiation, but simply a mode of international commu-
nication that becomes, in turn, the only final objective sought realistically:
the tribune function that unfolds on the international scene does not entail
an order of substitution any more than the tribune function within a soci-
ety entails a political program or even a real intention to accede to power.
The accompanying rhetoric finds here its principal limit: drawing its force
from the exemption to define the contours of a new order, it must be satis-
fied with the at least partial reproduction of the interstate order it fights. As
with all tribunes, the international tribune maximizes its gains when it re-
tains its protest role.

The rationality founding classical international interaction tends to ex-
plode: the cost-gain relation no longer means the same thing to the actors;
certain very costly action becomes foolish in the context of international
relations but appears coherent and rational in the tribune context. In this

218 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

situation, the partner’s behavior is less predictable, and the very principle
of dissuasion can get confused. Incomprehension between Western diplo-
macies and certain diplomacies of the Muslim world depend not only on
the ambiguity of cultural mediations but also on the extreme difficulty of
reconciling the two, which, by definition, are irreconcilable.

Clearly, protest strategy is unequally distributed throughout the non-
Western world. The fact that it exists principally in the Muslim world con-
firms that it reflects first and foremost the exclusion and denunciation of the
failed universalization of international relations. From this point of view, Is-
lam’s ability to organize in force transnationally and to criticize the Western
model’s claim to universality must be seen as a serious explanatory vari-
able. But it would be culturally naive to make it a primary variable and es-
pecially to distinguish a priori between cultures that entail tribunal under-
takings and those that do not or cannot. The diffusion of tribune strategies
can certainly occur outside Islam, can occupy other cultural spaces, and, es-
pecially, structure other types of conflict. Thus in this context particularly,
what tends to be used is a populist diplomacy, where international engage-
ment in the tribune mode extends very obviously the orientation of internal
policies followed by the prince, which occurred, for example, with General
Noriega in Panama: here the construction of an actively ant-American for-
eign policy corresponded neither to an ideological alignment, nor to the
search for new patronage, nor even to a renewed conception of neutrality,
but rather to international protest devoid of any representation of what the
“new world order” should be. It is precisely for this reason that such a strat-
egy has little chance of producing change, but it does stand to gain from pro-
longing the current international disorder.

The Process of International Innovation

In this context, the possibilities of invention can appear reduced: the in-
terest in change appears as slight as the latitude left to the actors to trans-
form the rules of international interaction. Just as in the internal order,
deviation also has creative virtues. Though the reactivation of dominated
cultures has little in common with other resources, it can upset the state
model and promote a new process of world regionalization; it can also, in
the long term, bring about new modes of articulation between internal
order and external order. The two hypotheses can be verified empirically
to demonstrate that this change is not merely theoretical, but has in fact
begun.

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 219

The Regionalization of the World

The regionalization of the world comes from the diverse realizations that,
combined, transcend the political map of states and accept another divi-
sion of the international order, one that takes into account to a certain ex-
tent the givens of cultural particularism. Four formulas emerge here: the
formation of vast cultural groupings that crystallize around transnational
cultural inflows, that contest, and even combat states; the elaboration of
unions of states according to procedures aiming at the integration and then
the transcendence of state logic; the constitution of regional poles around
powerful states, combining in an ambiguous manner their identities as
states and the will to dissolve those identities into vaster entities; and ef-
forts to resolve the problems linked to infra-state particularisms by con-
structing regions distinct from states and claiming autonomy.

There are several contradictory ways to carry out the first of these for-
mulas. The reactivation of cultural inflows within the periphery of the in-
ternational system creates “imperial spaces” corresponding largely to
protest ends; the reconstitution of a Muslim or a Hindu world appears ini-
tially as a way to enunciate a critical discourse: protest against domination
by the Western model; protest against the national unit as an integrated
space uniting different cultural or ethnic communities; protest against the
state as a way to organize political society and even as a source of secular-
ization; and finally protest against the governors in place, their authoritar-
ian practices and their sociopolitical failures. Both these worlds, and po-
tentially others (for example, that of Indian-ness in Latin America, of
African-ness on the dark continent, or of pan-Turkism in Asia or Europe),
create sustained interaction between the protest practices unable to merge
with the workings of the state and imperial cultural appeals presented as
possible substitutes for defiance. Revivalist and neotraditional intellectual
movements alike emerge as vectors of this new production of a space that
consecrates a large part of its discourse to distinguishing itself from the
Western-style state: the dar al-islam is that of the believers; the Hindu
world of the BJP is not that of the Indian nation-state, but refers to a mythi-
cal space that excludes other communities, but which does include the Hi-
malayan states and Sri Lanka. This cultural regionalization constructed
“from the bottom up” produces timid echoes in institutional initiatives,
which give it a positive orientation even though, there too, their beginning
can be seen as a protest response to a challenge: the Islamic Conference was
organized in 1969 to protest the burning of Jerusalem’s El-Aqsa mosque.

220 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

This type of institution unites states jealous of their prerogatives and has no
mission to institute a new mode of regionalization, or even to structure a
space that grassroots protest initiatives have helped significantly to design.
The Conference’s charter stipulates the “respect for the sovereignty, inde-
pendence, and territorial integrity of each member state.” ” On the other
hand, medium-range institutional initiatives can have a much more signifi-
cant structuring effect, as suggested by the rise of the IGO and especially
the NGO uniting Muslim intellectuals, academics, technicians, and mer-
chants, and thus constituting the beginning of regional communalization.
“Community of pain” and “community of usefulness” produce the first
connections of cultural groups and guarantee their international existence:
the recent success of the Turkish community party in Bulgaria, the anti-
Turk repression in Greece, the organization of the Muslim community in
Bosnia, the development of relations between Turkey and post-Stalinist Al-
bania, and the exit of Turkish-speaking peoples from the defunct Soviet
Union are numerous events that escape state diplomacy and that create, de
facto, an internationally relevant regional space before even the Turkish
state can take a clear position on the question.

The union of states can appear as another variable in the process of region-
alization and supplanting of the state model. Contrary to the cultural
whole, the union of states is first of all the product of a diplomatic rational-
ity and a choice from above; it is, however, marked by two novel character-
istics that it shares with the preceding model: the hypothesis that this union
can give rise to anew mode of political communalization; and the convic-
tion that it will lead to a challenge of the state context and the rules of the
game comprising it. In the very center of the Western world, the European
construct has already begun to shake statist-national structures by replac-
ing citizen allegiances with the interactions of multiple allegiances that,
paradoxically, revitalize particularisms: the reduction of trans-state pan-
European networks promotes, in fact, a resurgence of identification both
European and subregional. Lyons, Milan, Frankfurt, or Barcelona—all wish
to redefine themselves as European metropolises, while the development of
regional leagues in Italy, the revitalization of regions in France, and the
Lander in Germany crystallize new particularisms. Initiatives and the move
to federate on the part of the states menace their own survival, and at the
same time become a source of innovation for the international order.

The phenomenon stands out much more starkly, and thus with greater
uncertainty, in the South. There the union of states validates a regional

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 221

group whose cultural identity is more confirmed, whereas at the same time
the leaders are more prudent, more jealous of their sovereign prerogatives,
and much more intent on preserving the attributes of statehood, of which
they have made themselves the importers and that guarantee their own sur-
vival. The progressive and sensitive construction of the Union of Arabic
Maghreb (UAM) clearly reveals this tension. Established in February 1989
by the Treaty of Marrakech, this new authority first marked the end of an
era of conflict among its five member states: Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Mau-
ritania, and Tunisia. Fundamentally, it is a coalition in strict obedience to
state rationalities and possesses all the means to protect itself against any
attempt from the statist-national level to dismantle it. The end of the 1980s
saw the advent of a situation in which several common requirements led
each of the states to opt for coalition: the convergence of crises and con-
straints linked to debt, economic difficulties, and the negative effects of a
similar type of social mobilization; the recourse to the same “improve-
ment” revenues, at the time when Algeria turned toward the IMF and the
World Bank, and when it accepted privatization and proceeded to dena-
tionalize; the appearance of common stakes whose processing implied a
policy of cooperation, particularly regarding the development of territory,
irrigation, and food distribution. Moreover, these crises were apparent
enough and presented sufficiently threatening political implications to
convince each of the leaders of the need to help one another, including
with internal repression, and to not risk, through rivalry, creating places of
refuge in the neighboring states for its own opponents. In short, the union
of states made sense as a way to stifle the constitution of a Maghrebian com-
munity of pain and protest. Finally, to this was added the need to counter
the constitution in the North of a European Community: the importation

of the state model was followed precisely by that of the confederal model.

The result of these choices is, however, ambiguous. Institutionally, the

projects that risked damaging state sovereignty were rejected; thus Libya’s

project of total fusion failed, as well as Tunisia’s model, which militated for
a structure resembling the institutions of the European community. Nor
did fiscal harmony, monetary union, or a customs union figure among the

selected objectives. The only ones put in place were bilateral and multilat-

eral accords, which were quite numerous and always timely, concerning ed-

ucation, commercial exchanges, and cooperation for energy and mines,

such as, for example, the gas pipeline linking the Algerian oasis Essafsaf to

the Libyan city of Zwara, and passing by Gafsa and Zarzis, or the one link-

ing Hassi r’mel to Tangiers. Yet the basic idea is not there: the very project

222 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

of a UAM, following three decades of testy nationalism and, especially, in
the almost complete absence of cooperation, helps reorient individual be-
havior in a profound way, particularly that of the leaders. The free circula-
tion in the Maghreb zone of technicians, intellectuals, and civil servants of
the five states concerned significantly renews the very conditions of their
socialization and, in the long run, the nature of their interests. In any case,
such circulation noticeably strains their bond with the state model and
helps them think of their identity and their project in a regional context,
where history, culture, and the community of needs faced with other re-
gional groups can provoke other interests and conceptions of political ac-
tion. In short, the very hypothesis of a state bourgeoisie defined as the
surest vector of importation of the Western state model tends to grow weak
and thus open the way to greater possibilities for innovation.”®

It appears clear that beyond Europe and the Maghreb, this type of re-
gionalization tends to spread and to find an additional boost, notably since
the crumbling of the iron curtain and the attenuation of the ideological di-
vision in the world: examples of this include the reactivation of ASEAN in
Southeast Asia; the strengthening of regional accords in Latin America,
particularly the reactivation of the Andean Pact and the creation of Merco-
sur uniting the Southern countries; the decrease in the number of inter-
African cooperative entities; and proliferation of links between the Chi-
nese coast and its immediate neighbors through special economic zones
(SEZ), which the People’s Republic had to allow. In each of these cases, one
can see the beginning of the same movement toward recomposition of po-
litical geography, the same relaxing of state uniformity, the same search for
a new conception of international relations in which the rise of a still very
relative multipolarity connects with the affirmation of cultural spaces re-
lating to a particular history.

New regional poles can thus form around power states with more or less
confirmed hegemonic tendencies and create other types of innovation,
but also other types of paradoxes. The current Japanese practice of koku-
saika, that is, of internationalization, contributes to a J apanese sphere of
influence that spreads well beyond its own political borders and that com-
bines elements of state rationality and a cluster of extrapolitical inflows in
a rather complex manner, borrowing significantly from codes that govern
classical international order. There is a strong tension between the pru-
dence of the Japanese state, which has long ceased trying to acquire inter-
national diplomatic clout, and the wide variety of practices from civil so-

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 223

ciety that produce a regional space dominated by Japanese economy and
culture. Officially, the Japanese state still follows the doctrine of Datsua
Nyuo (i.e., let’s leave Asia, and turn to Europe), developed during the
Meiji period; strategically, the Japanese state remains profoundly marked
by the cost of the imperialist adventure that preceded and accompanied
World War II. As a response to such institutional diplomacy, the inverse
doctrine of “return to Asia” brought considerable progress, heightened
by Japan’s crisis in cultural identity and also supported by appeals from
peripheral states. The rigor of the state cadre is thus softened by the dy-
namism of Japanese universities, which recruit 70 percent of their schol-
arship students from the best students in Southeast Asia, and educate the
executives of subsidiaries and branches of Japanese firms in Indonesia,
Malaysia, and Thailand. The same occurred after the Meiji period, when
Chinese, Korean, and Malaysian students attended Japanese universities
in order to enter the elite in their home countries. A “cultural sphere of
ideograms” formed, and Japanese financing brought new strengths to this
regional solidarity: at the end of the 1960s Japan placed 27 percent of its
investments worldwide in Southeast Asia, that is, almost ro billion dol-
lars." Japan was the largest foreign investor in Indonesia, Thailand (where
it controls 55 percent of the investments as opposed to 7 percent by the
United States), Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. The role of the
large Japanese companies is determinantal, though it does not imply a
real transfer of technology: resulting financial inflows lead to a de facto
control of Southeast Asian economies, without risk of the latter endan-
gering the regional hegemony of the Japanese investors. Divisions appear
here that quite clearly refine and design this new space: electronics in
Malaysia, agribusiness in Thailand, heavy industry in Indonesia, and ser-
vices in Singapore.

This type of evolution entails many contradictions. First, it clearly op-
poses two political geometries: that of a Japanese nation-state rigorously
based on universal rules and interactions, scrupulously assuming its role of
imitator and political client of the United States; and that of a somewhat
imprecise sphere of Japanese influence, indeed, hegemony, with an uncer-
tain and altered institutionalization constituted of resources taken from
civil society and crystallizing into an economic and cultural order. In the
long run, this first tension nourished claims for political emancipation
from Japan and thus for an end to dependence, as is already suggested by
the debates surrounding the third renewal of the Japan-American treaty in
June 1990. Significantly, this review—which also implied a review of the

224 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

constitution and thus of the internal political order—aroused great interest
among the young generations within the economic ministry.”

At the same time, however, this new cultural space is not formed from a
rupture with the Western model. Though Japan exercises increasing con-
trol over the education of Southeast Asian elites, Japanese elites continue
to study at American universities; though the dynamic in civil society dis-
rupts clientelist bonds with the United States and further shakes a political
system quite obviously in a state of crisis and only weakly legitimated in-
ternally, protest movements offer no other model to replace the current po-
litical order. Henceforth, the possibilities for innovation are more con-
nected to the evolution of the external dynamic than the internal one and
are more a function of regionalization than a real capacity to detach from
Western tutelage. In other words, the change is regulated, not by the crisis
of the international system occurring within its own center, but by the ef-
fects of innovation that the regional orders create at the periphery of the
international system. Similarly, the accumulation of material resources
does not seem to be, either today or yesterday, the motor driving these
transformations, in contrast to the developmentalist view: Japanese eco-
nomic power has not in itself created antidotes to westernization and polit-
ical dependence but has actually amplified these trends. Rupture seems to
come from the construction of spaces damaging to the international order,
specifically in the chain of consequences of a regionalization that reacti-
vates cultural logics and solidarities totally autonomous from the codes or-
ganizing the international order. The disappearance of the Soviet refer-
ence, which formerly gave meaning to regional regroupings that was
directly compatible with the dominant model of international relations,
merely reinforces such a process.

Corresponding to a union of states or a hegemony of one state, the pro-
liferation of regional poles tends to have a restructuring effect, though
tempered and limited by mediation from the state entity. Everything seems
to indicate that the capacity for control exercised by this entity constitutes
the key aspect of innovation processes: European integration, the UAM,
the new Far Eastern space, and even the “Muslim world” are bearers of in-
vention in their ability to effect networks of transnational solidarities, of
new identification modes, and especially of new forms of insertion into the
international system that escape traditional diplomatic logic.

Regionalization of the world also refers to the formation of sub-state or
trans-state groups destined to resolve problems linked to the existence of

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 225

national minorities and the difficulties of their coexistence with the prin-
ciples of the state model. The founding distinction between public space
and private space and the postulate that the individual is first and foremost
a citizen supposes that the state knows only the individual divested of any
intermediary identity. For this reason, national minorities have always
been dispossessed of an international personality and no one has ever rec-
ognized their right to accede to the international order or the institutions
that structure it.

However, interstate interactions very quickly brought perverse effects.
Minorities have quite often become de facto international actors, notably
because they were used by states as instruments of rivalry. The evolution of
the Kurdish question is particularly significant. As a particularism coming
to consciousness of itself, it crashed headlong into state logic: it can realize
itself only by upsetting and challenging the state model in its region. Its for-
mation and especially its growth are to a great degree the result of political
and diplomatic maneuvers initiated by the states in the region. Thus Soviet
diplomacy upheld the formation of a Kurdish identity and encouraged the
1946 proclamation of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, principally with
the view to weaken the region’s states and establish its own sphere of influ-
ence. In the same way, but later, the Iranian state materially supported the
Iraqi Kurdish movement of Mustafa Al-Barzani in order to get the upper
hand in its strictly interstate border dispute with Iraq during the Shatt-al-
Arab affair. At the same time, the shah decided to abandon his policy of
Kurdish support, which had suddenly become cumbersome, for the recon-
ciliation of the two partners in Algiers in 1975. In turn, the Syrian state,
though menaced by the reawakened Kurdish movement, helped the Turk-
ish Kurds several times in order to pressure Ankara; it also helped the Iraqi
Kurds in order to settle its dispute with the Ba’ath power in Baghdad. In
turn, the Iraqi state supported the Iranian Kurds in their rebellion against
the Islamic Pepublic, while the Turkish state, in conflicts with its own mi-
nority, discreetly opened in 1978 its border to the Kurdish peshmergas,
even while it developed the means for military intervention and “police
operations” in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Kurdish example merits particular attention because it so clearly
reveals the contradiction: threatened in their very identity, the states in-
volved are led by their own logic to actively participate in a mobilization
that leads to their negation. Though more attenuated, the same phenome-
non accompanies the development of most of the identity movements con-
cerning several states: Tamils in India and Sri Lanka, Druzes in Syria and

226 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

Lebanon, Azeris in Iran and the former Soviet Union, Baluchis in Pakistan
and Iran, and even the Basques in France and Spain. With each of these
groups, an identity-based regional space emerges, beyond that of the state,
in which all are energized by their own interactions.

National minorities isolated within a state do not give rise to the same
contradictions, and no longer, by definition, provoke this strange suicide of
the states in question. Nevertheless, these minorities do tend to insert
themselves into diplomatic activities and to transform international inter-
action into a production of identity legitimation: Muslim minorities in the
Philippines, India, the former Soviet Union, and Ethiopia supported by
diplomacy and even military aid from the Muslim states needing to reacti-
vate their religious legitimacy; Turkish minorities in Cyprus and East Eu-
rope who become stakes in the political debate in Ankara and thus sources
of intensification; Tibetans supported by India as a diplomatic counterbal-
ance to China; Lebanese Christians encouraged by Baghdad during the
Taef accords in order to weaken the Syrian Ba’ath position. Thus states do
not function like a closed club protecting its precious monopoly that, the-
oretically, should allow them alone to control the international scene.
Their action at this level leads them irresistibly to participate in the con-
struction of regional cultural spaces that, over time, tend to negate them.

This dynamic reflects not only political-diplomatic interactions but also
works within states as an extension of the internal functions of political sys-
tems, and notably of rivalries that intensify during the quest for power. The
Kurdish example is, again, significant in the evolution of the Turkish state:
more westernized than its neighbors, and thus more intransigent in its Ja-
cobin and integrationist visions, Kemalist Turkey has had to slowly evolve
toward de facto recognition of a Kurdish personality: the Kurdish language
is accepted as an aspect of a subnational culture; at the same time, contacts
in the highest level of the state with Kurdish leaders are no longer secret;
the massive acceptance of Kurdish refugees following the Gulf War and the
role officially conceded to the United Nations at this time signaled the be-
ginning of a recognized internationalization of the Kurdistan question.
Significantly, a large part of the initiative was assumed by the Social Demo-
cratic Populist Party, which is, from the partisan point of view, the direct
descendant of Kemalist orthodoxy: from its ranks come the eight Kurdish
deputies who participated in the 1989 conference in Paris on the Kurdish
question, which, of course, later on caused their expulsion from their party;
but it was also with the goal of recapturing votes that the Kemalist party de-
cided officially to open its ranks to Kurdish candidates for the October rg9t

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 227

legislative elections, and thus to receive almost all seats for southeast Ana-
tolia, but also to prefigure a Kurdish representation in the parliament in
Ankara. At the same time, in [raq an active repression alternates with quasi-
official negotiations between the state and Kurdish representatives. These
dealings clearly respond to political moves on the part of the prince with a
view to maximizing his chances of remaining in power: that is to say that in-
ternal politics, in all its forms, leads, at least in certain conjunctures, to
manifestations of recognition of minorities, perhaps precarious recogni-
tion, but sufficient to shape a space that can no longer be effaced.”°

The state, in both its internal and external functions, contributes to the
emergence of regional cultural spaces instead of containing them and dis-
couraging their formation. Whatever the rigor of the Jacobin model ex-
plicitly present in every imported model of the state, particularisms are in
the end confirmed by the interactive processes that are both inherent to
state logic and a source of its extinction. Moreover, the crisis of citizenship
allegiance and the subsequent reinforcement of communitarian identifica-
tions support from below a dynamic that, surprisingly, is also activated
from the top. Though particularist slippages are initiated by the states only
in certain national or international conjunctures, but subject to reversals
and even repression at other moments, everything concurs to render the
effects of these explosive processes indelible and irreversible. Everything
happens as if the state order instigated an entropic logic that could be con-
sidered a bearer of innovation: the resulting regional cultural spaces are
not only a pure negation of the idea of the state; but as they form, they too
tend to define themselves positively in relation to existing political spaces,
to the international scene, and to other cultural spaces. Their difficult ter-
ritorialization thus leads to another forced innovation: taking away the
state’s monopoly of international action and decentralizing this action
toward the individual and the group, these new regional spaces reconstruct
internal and external modes of articulation.

Internal and External: End of a Segregation

The most significant innovation, which in the long run promises the hap--
piest result, probably has to do with the reconciliation of the internal and
the external. In classical theory, with traditional diplomacy and the de-
clared designation of roles, internal order was that of individuals, citizens,
and subjects, while external order was the province of the states alone. The
international scene was an exclusive club from which the individual was ex-

228 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

cluded. In this sense, decolonization marked a rupture of sovereignty, but
proclaimed a continuity in both theory and practice: the principle of state
succession was firmly retained by the new princes, which shows just how ef-
fective the distinction was.

Rupture here comes from the chain of effects resulting from inter-
national disorder: the proliferation of allegiances, the activation of trans-
national solidarities, and deterritorialization place the individual increas-
ingly in the position of arbiter for the multiple identificauons and
mobilizations soliciting his help. The international scene is henceforth
only the guarded space of collective actors, and even less that of states
alone: the international scene is peopled with an infinity of individual ac-
tors and is sustained by a composite of an almost unlimited number of mi-
crodecisions. Of course, states do not abdicate; of course, individuals are
“recommunalized” into numerous aggregates that produce a new social-
ization and new solidarities. But still, when the individual accedes to inter-
national responsibility, he profoundly shakes the order of what was until
then presented as “foreign.” Theoretically, the consequences are already
enormous: losing its role of obligatory intermediary between internal and
external, the state abandons a large part of its legitimacy and its functions;
the very hypothesis of a public space cannot fail to suffer from this trans-
formation, which the international extension of private social spaces rela-
tivizes from without, the idea of national interest supported, nevertheless,
by the classical theory of international relations.

At the same time, this individualization is associated with a recomposi-
tion and a reactivation of cultural spaces that the state frowns upon. The
public sphere is this time damaged by the rise of particularisms and by the
substitution of cultural identification with the universalist orientation of
citizenship. Individual logic and cultural logic can, however, be balanced
harmoniously, with the first softening the effects of the second by offering
it a minimal mobility. Individuals are not imprisoned by permanent identi-
ties, which sociological critique shows do not exist, aside from the slightest
of ideological constructions suggested by these identities. For this reason,
the “primordialist” vision of cultures and nations affirms a hastily con-
structed and poorly understood doctrine regarding the awakening of reli-
gious revivalism. One must admit, however, that such an induction is in-
correct and that it obscures the conjuncture of the logic of cultural
alienation and the process of reactive mobilization supporting such move-
ments. If one effaced these last parameters, the cultural referents would
certainly not disappear: integrated at last as organizing principles of non-

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 229

Western states, they would inevitably be combined with individualist logic
and the decrease in solicitations from the growing diversity of transna-
tional inflows.

Numerous studies have, in fact, shown that the individual is not incom-
patible with any culture:*! the acceptable and fruitful hypothesis of a “com-
munitarian culture” does not exclude that of an active and cunning indi-
vidual; it merely distinguishes a way to organize social relations, which is a
way for the individual to give meaning to his insertion in urban society, to
conceive and practice his sociability, to construct his relation to the group,
and to define himself within whatever exchange relations are in effect. One
can thus distinguish the main axes of acommunitarian culture in which po-
litical space relates to the group more than to a fixed governmental center,
in which power relates more to a conception of authority included in the
workings of the community rather than to an abstract system of delega-
tions, in which economics relates more to a group of practices “recessed”
into the social structure than to an individual positioning in the market-
place. All these elements qualify what can—or could—be a communitarian
mode of social innovation in the definition of civil obedience, institutions,
the normative system, or economic transformations. Though they con-
struct the individual’s role differently, they nevertheless do not efface it.
Though they tend to negate individualism, they in no way reject the rele-
vance of individual action.

Henceforth, the simultaneity of the individual’s ascension on the inter-
national scene and the profusion of particularisms entails no major con-
tradiction. On the contrary, it can bring about innovation, as long as the af-
firmation of cultural identities ceases to have first and foremost a tribune
orientation. As long as it is limited to mobilizing against a hegemony that
crystallizes all the frustrations, the militant cultural identification has no
chance of producing new utopias and being a factor in change, as is sug-
gested by the great poverty of national and international programs under-
taken by revivalist movements, no matter where they develop. Though it
also becomes the foundation of a rearrangement of political spaces, the re-
construction of identities can profit from the activation of the individual’s
international responsibility. Faced with the growing fragility of territorial
categories, the uncertainties that weaken the imported state, the challenge
to the very principle of nationality misinterpreted as universal, the auton-
omy conceded to the individual offers him the means to construct his own
identity, to distinguish between the various references he confronts, and to
divide his action among the various allegiances that appeal to him.

230 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

This arbitrage perspective concerns not only an uncertain future: it is al-
ready at work in more than one region of the world where the accumulation
of different levels of allegiance cannot fail to lead the individual to choose,
even if this choice is still restrained by the entirety of constraints linked to
dependence relations. The formation of new republics in central Asia has
happened in the context of crisscrossed pressures that appeal to the individ-
ual through the renewal of the state framework whose artifice has discreetly
improved after fifty years of common history, the pan-Islamist mobilization,
the Persian reference, and the call for pan-Turkism: political history, reli-
gion, and languages rival each other for loyalties where, in the end, only in-
dividual choice makes any difference.”” What can be said about the Horn of
Africa, between the Arab world and the African world, the Muslim world,
and the Christian world? Of Sahelian Africa between identification through
the dar al islam and identification through a culture and networks that find
their roots or ramifications as far away as the shores of the Gulf of Guinea?
Of the Hausa, between the bonds of brotherhood, ancient allegiances to the
sultanate, and the paths toward the Niger delta? For maps of cultures are
never rigid and identities are not innate: because potential identifications
are fortunately always multiple, the individual finds, in the end, the means
to choose and have an effect in his growing transnationality.”*

He also acquires a greater possibility of integrating so-called “foreign”
events into his political choices and his networks of identification. The Gulf
War was an unexpected factor in the rapprochement of the Hindu and Mus-
lim communities in India in their shared hostility to U.S. intervention. The
exacerbation of the Azeri and Armenian conflict, particularly apropos of
Nagorno-Karabakh and its visibility in the media, recently helped change
the conditions of political mobilization in Turkey, to support pan-Turkish
and anti-West appeals, and to fuel debates within the political class, thereby
upsetting the diplomatic strategies elaborated at the European Community
summit. The revision of alliances in the Indian subcontinent was inter-
preted as obviously socially motivated, once the loosening of bonds be-
tween Pakistan and the United States and the rapprochement between the
United States and the Indian Union were accepted as a dangerous simplifi-
cation of the Kashmir conflict, which thus became the exclusive expression
of a confrontation between the Islamic world and its adversaries.

These internal and external events share the common characteristic of
coming about due to mediation by the social actors. Such processes help
structure the political actions of individuals, to complete their socializa-
tion, and to orient their identifications. At the same time, they limit or hin-

INTERNATIONAL DISORDERS 231

der the state’s omnipotence in the elaboration of foreign policies and in-
creasingly substitute the acuity of transnational alignments for the social-
izing role of the state and the discourse on national interest. Henceforth,
the growing confusion of the internal and the external clearly weakens the
state’s logic, freeing many new sources of change.

International disorder is thus creative and not limited to entropic effects
only. Even so, it is not only and not necessarily a factor in innovation, which
occurs only if four conditions are met: the factors of resistance do not pre-
vail, the elements of change are not principally manipulated for protest
ends, the sources of incoherence do not win out, and especially, the logic of
dependence does not neutralize the process of transformation.

Certainly, the elites of the state do not lack the means to resist. They
possess instruments of force and find resources to confront upheavals in
their role as importer; they acquire from their client position assurances of
the international community’s protection in critical moments. Even in
open conflict with the West, Saddam Hussein received serious offers from
the West to preserve the status quo from the threats to international order
posed by the Kurdish movement. This slant is doubly intensified, by ap-
peals to the exterior and authoritarian practices, and risks further discred-
iting the imported state.

Protest logic is itself a source of blockage. The vast tribunal recuper-
ation of all contemporary modes of thwarting the state invariably con-
tributes to blocking innovation. First because those who undertake it settle
into it and derive their effectiveness from the vagueness of their program.
Then, because no mobilization would have the same unanimist virtue or
the same intensity if the promotion of cultural identities did not go hand in
hand with a timid particularism and a tendency to exclusivity, which para-
lyze their innovative effects.

The risks of entropy are no less negligible. Before being innovative, dis-
order creates a situation of anomie that all sociologists agree is a factor in
conflict. The crisis of universality has up to the present brought more ten-
sion and violence than the invention of new models. This state is even more
prominent because anomie causes individuals more often than not to con-
struct their identification negatively, in response to mobilization processes
that oppose them to other collectivities: Hindu processions against Musim
processions, Islamist demonstrations against the United States or the West,
Gagauz movements against the Moldavians, Armenians against Turks and
Azeris, etc. In addition, one of the major stakes that challenge the state
model has to do precisely with the state’s monopoly on the use of legitimate

232 FAILED UNIVERSALIZATION, CREATIVE DEVIATION

violence: the most immediate effect of international disorder is a very
strong spread of this type of violence, of which terrorist movements are the
most obvious illustration.

All these changes can be understood in a context of power that cannot be
abolished by decree, not even under pressure from individuals or collectiv-
ities. Because dependence does not derive from a plot or conspiracy, but
from a characteristic of the international system and the way resources are
distributed, it would be naive to think that protest against this order could
lead invariably to a transcending of it. In reality, the most constraining ele-
ment of dependence logic is that it is the principal source of the interna-
tional order and that it thus helps expel into the sphere of protest every-
thing that could threaten that dependence. To rigidify resistance in protest
actions is probably the most reliable guarantee of the durability of the in-
ternational order.

Conclusion

Dispensence takes form in culture, in imitation, and in the image. Its
startling symbolic ability prevails over the effect of infrastructures, diplo-
matic burdens, and even military constraints. Both internationally and in
microsocieties, the weight of conformity, the pressure of social control,
and the supremacy of the dominant model have been able to look effective
and durable. Though it did not put an end to coercion, cultural dependence
became the most promising principle of world unification: it is without a
doubt the clearest foundation of what is called the “international order.”

On the other hand, the awakening of peripheral cultures quickly be-
came an instrument to denounce hegemonies, the “weapon of the poor,”
indeed, the ultimate resource of collectivities relegated to the margins of
the international system. As emblems of resistance, factors of mobiliza-
tion, and means to reconquer identity and sovereignty, cultural revivalisms
have accomplished on the international scene the double function of rein-
tegrating individuals in the often very vast transnational whole and of re-
constituting particularisms that seem to proliferate infinitely. Princes and
protest leaders have quickly understood-in Africa, Asia, and even Eastern
Europe-the course of action they should take, but also the threats and un-
certainties that could result. Political in their ability and goals, cultures
have also become political in the rhythm of their awakening and their con-
frontations, political in their very essence.

Thus today, dependence and its protest refer to a curious opposition of
strategies: to diffuse one’s own culture to better dominate the others, and

234 CONCLUSION

thus make one’s particularism into the universal; to import the elements of
the dominant culture to give one the means to more surely govern collec-
tivities that are foreign to it; and to make the quest for identity and its haz-
ards the basic element of a protest strategy that is both national and inter-
national. This means that by dint of being solicited, indeed manipulated for
political ends, to govern or to oppose, identities have paradoxically in-
creasingly become the instruments of political action. Thus, far from being
outdated or rigid, these identities are in essence mobile and multiple; they
evolve and transform according to need and situation, but also as a function
of initiatives taken by the political actors who make them a decisive element
in their strategy and their rivalry.

Under these conditions, cultural dependence cannot be a simple—or
simplistic—vision of an opposition between dominators and dominated. It
has first of all to do with the composition of very complex actions that lead
numerous individuals and groups to find in the importation of Western
models multiple advantages that cannot be reduced to a simple cynical cal-
culation. The process is even more significant and probably more lasting,
since many of these actors, in the very repetition of such practices, count
on it as their best chance of survival and often see in it their only hope of
political effectiveness.

Moreover, while one can locate the dominant culture in the universalist
enunciation that the Western model of the state makes of itself, it is obvi-
ously invalid to tally up the dominated cultures. Created in a space of polit-
ical confrontation, mobile and diverse, these cultures reflect in their insta-
bility the inanity of essentialist theses so often put forward in history
books. It seems particularly clear that behind the facile formula of “domi-
nated cultures” lie first of all the perpetually reconstructed systems of
meaning that form at the confluence of expectations supported by alien-
ated and frustrated social actors and efforts undertaken by professionals of
protest who hope to find some profit.

Here we find the very heart of two major contradictions. Forced west-
ernization generates both order and entropy: it imposes universal rules
without being able to make them work; it enunciates a unification of worlds
without unifying meaning. It is, however, dangerous to confuse this en-
tropy with the organized affirmation of countermodels: this shaky order
mobilizes cultural references against itself that serve as emblems rather
than substitutes. The chances for innovation are thus limited in this curi-
ous opposition between a “culture of government” and identity-based mo-
bilizations that exhaust their resources in reactive strategies.

CONCLUSION 235

For example, it would be false to state that the opposition between West-
ern culture and Islamic culture conditions the insertion of the Muslim
world into the international order. This idea can, of course, refer to failures
of meaning affecting Western political models when they are forcefully
transposed into this region of the world. But on the other hand, the idea of
opposition is illusory: instead of a site of confrontation between two cul-
tures, multiple political enterprises proliferate to mobilize cultural sym-
bols taken from Islam in order to rally discontent under the banner of re-
jection of the Western model. Entropy offers chances for protest; but it
clears only the smallest of paths to innovation.

In these conditions, culturalism can bring the best and the worst, in
both theory and practice. By showing the diversity of systems of meaning,
by criticizing universalist postulates, and by evaluating the effects of the
diffusion of models, culturalism accomplishes great progress for knowl-
edge, particularly on the international scene. By reifying and rigidifying
cultures, by forcing their characteristics so much as to back them into ghet-
tos, and by pushing relativism to the absurd, culturalism has replaced its
naive universalism with the vision of an international order that is by defi-
nition impossible, condemning everyone to chose between domination and
disorder, between the uniformity of the Western model and the infinite
shattering of cultures.

A cultural analysis “revisited” and emancipated from such simplifica-
tions can help us think of intercultural relations in other terms. These can,
in effect, have an entirely different meaning when they are no longer domi-
nated by the dialectic of importation and resistance, of negation of differ-
ence and exclusion. The international scene as the entirety of the societies
that compose it is de facto multicultural, just as the theories of social com-
munication had already intuited in the past. This multiculturality has not
abolished cultures: on the contrary, it seeks to downplay difference. The
stakes that emerge from this observation have to do with the institutional-
ization of plurality in terms of global relations and national relations. Such
stakes presuppose the reconstruction of many categories familiar to us,
and engage a debate on the transformation that history imposes on the
concepts of the state, nation, and territory; this is the debate that dis-
cusses the future of failed universalization and in which lies all hope of fu-
ture innovations.

Reference Matter

Notes

Chapter 1

1. Among an abundance of sources, these are notable: Amin, /mpérialisme;, Car-
doso and Faletto, Dependency and Development; Kay, Dependent Development;
and Prebisch, Economic Development of Latin America.

2. Lenin, Jmperialism.

3. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital.

4. Cardoso, Politique et développement.

5. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations; Aron, Paix et guerre; cf. W. Smith, Eu-
ropean Imperialism, pp. 78ff.; Wesseling, Expansion and Reaction.

6. Tilly, “War-making and State-Making”; Rasler and Thompson, War and
State-making.

7. Schumpeter, /mpérialisme et classes sociales.

8. Galtung, “Structural Theory of Imperialism.”

g. Callaghy, “State as Lame Leviathan.”

10. These recent publications may be consulted: Sandbrook, Politics, and Mé-
dard, “LEtat néo-patrimonial.”

11. This is revealed by the surge of literature on ethnicity, particularism, and
segmentedness: see, for example, Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict; Vail, Cre-
ation of Tribalism; Amselle and Mbokolo, Au coeur de l’ethnie; and Chrétien and
Prunier, Les ethnies ont une histoire.

12. See Théobald, Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment.

13. Moore, “Clientelist Ideology and Political Change,” pp. 271ff.; Miller, “The
Dowreh and Iranian Politics.”

240

14.

15.

16.

77.

18.
19.
20.
QI.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.

NOTES

Field, The Merchants.

Banfield, Moral Basis.

See in particular Chazan, “Patterns,” and Lemarchand, “The State.”
On-site inquiry, August-September, 1987, Quarterly Digest.

See, in particular, Lubeck, African Bourgeoisie.

Frank, Le développement du sous-développement.

Cardoso, “Associated Dependent Development.”

Gilpin, War and Change. z
O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism.
Hobsbawm, Les Primitifs de la révolte.

See, particularly, Wade, Governing the Market Economy.

Adda and Smouts, La France face au Sud.

For the classic definition, see Médard, “Le rapport de clientéle,” p. 103.
On this subject, see S. Smith, “L’Afrique poubelle,” p. 117.

On the effects of a change in patronage, in the case of Somalia, see Com-

pagnon, “Somalie,” and Laitin and Samatar, Somalia.

29.

30
Sr,

32.

Pahlavi, Réponse a l’Histoire, pp. 242-47.

Beblawi and Luciani, Rentier State, p. 11.

Najmabadi, “Depolitization of a Rentier State,” pp. 213ff.

Ibid., pp. 216-18; Mahdavy, “Patterns and Problems”; Al-Kuwairi, Oil

Revenues.

33.
34.

35:

36.

37-

38.
39:
40.

4I.

42.
43-
44.

45:

46.

47-
48.
49:
50.

These figures come from the Rapport Mondial, pp. 138ff.
Beauge and Roussillon, Le Migrant et son double.
Leveau, “Etat, société et rente pétroliére,” p- 670.
Flory et al., Les Régimes politiques arabes, p. 497.
Good, “Congo Crisis,” p. 49.

Strange, States and Markets.

Rosenau, 7urbulence in World Politics.

Bull, Anarchical Society.

See Katz and Wedell, Broadcasting in the Third World.
Le Monde, April ro, tg9t.

Piscatori, /slam in a World of Nation-States, p. 55.
Ibid., p. 50.

Herald Tribune, December 3, 1990.

Constantin, “Les relations internationales,” pp. 237ff.
Deéfis au Sud, p. 73.

Adda and Smouts, La France face au Sud, p. 275.

Ibid., pp. 275-76.

According to the sources cited, ibid., Pp. 277.

NOTES 241

51. Le Monde, December 5 and 7, 1990.

52

. Camanu, La Tunisie, p. 85.
. Ibid., p. 78.
. Baduel, Maghreb, p. 13.

Chapter 2

ony anp wp

. Ehrenberg, L’Etat grec, pp. 42 and 131.

. Bell, End of Ideology; Fukuyama, La Fin de l'histoire.
. Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires, p. 599.

. Durkheim, De da division du travail, p. 274.

As Parsons suggests, in Société, p. 148.

. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 23.
. Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires, p. 598.

. Almond and Verba, Civic Culture and Civic Culture Revisited. On this entire

debate, see Badie, Culture et politique.

9.

Io.

II.

I2.

13.

14.

15.
16.

17.

Eckstein, Division and Cohesion in Democracy.

On this debate, see Badie, Le Développement politique.
Vatkiotis, Nasser and His Generation.

See Hardin, “Hobbesian Political Order.”

Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 109.

Ibid., p. 112.

Ibid.

On these questions, see Badie, Les Deux Etats, p. 133.

See in particular Gaudemet, Les Communautés, and Badie, “Communauté,

individualisme et culture,” pp. 114ff.

18.
19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 110.

See Baali, Society, State and Urbanism.

Geertz, Meaning and Order; Gellner, Saints of the Atlas.

Compare Chevrier, “L’Etat en Chine” and Modernization in China.
Chevrier, “L’Etat,” pp. 8-11.

Fakkar, Reflets de la sociologie pré-marziste, pp. 82ff.; Algar, “Freemasonry

in Iran.”

24. Gernet, Le Monde chinois, p. 517.

25.

On Yan Fu, compare Schwartz, Jn Search of Wealth and Power, on Chen

Duxiu, see Feigon, Chen Duziu.

26.

Allies, L’Invention du territoire; Jacobson, Territorial Rights; Astwajyu, Par-

titioned Africans, Baduel, Le monde musulman.

27.

MacFarlane, Origins of English Individualism.

242

28.
29.
30.

31.

32.
33:
34-
35:
36.

37:

38.
39:
40.
4I.
42.

NOTES

Elias, La Dynamique de l’Occident.
Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress; Shaw, Title to Territory in Africa.
Meyer, “La crise sri-lankaise,” pp. 57ff.
Meyer, “Cingalais et Tamouls,” p. 160.
Yapp, Modern Near East, pp. 126ff.
See Flory, Annuaire francais de droit international, p. 253.
See Claudot-Hewod, “Des Etats-nations contre un peuple.”
Bourgeot, “L’identité touareg.”
Piscatori, /slam in a World of Nation-States, p. 84.
Ibid., pp. 87-88.
See Heesterman, /nner Conflict of Tradition, pp. 175-82 and 21-24.
Gonda, L’Hindouisme récent, pp. 360; Jaffrelot, Des nationalistes.
Crawford, Ram Mohan Roy.
Osborne, Before Kampuchea, pp. 165-66.
See André-Vincent, “Le dialogue Las Casas-Vitoria,” p. 42, and Villey, La

Formation de la pensée juridique moderne.

43:

See the opposed viewpoints of Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, and

Bozeman, The Future of Law.

44-
45:
46.
47-
48.
49-
50.
Bt.

Gernet, Le Monde chinois, pp. 177ff. and 250ff.

Yapp, Modern Near East, pp. 44-46.

Gernet, Le Monde chinois, pp. 416ff.

Ibid., pp. 451ff., 477ff., and 5ooaff.

Giddens, Nation State and Violence.

Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States.

Mayall, Nationalism and International Society, pp. 121ff.

Jackson, “Negative Sovereignty in Sub-Saharan Africa” and “Quasi States,

Dual Regimes and Neo-classical Theories.”

52.
53°
54:

See I. M. Lewis, “Ogaden,” and Gascon, “Les mouvements armés.”
Interview with Maitre Lahidji, by Patricia Pic-Sernaglia, October 27, 1990.
Evans-Pritchard, Les Nuer, and Leach, Les Systémes politiques.

Chapter 3

1. On the modernization of the Ottoman empire, see Polk and Chambers, Be-

ginnings of Modernization; B. Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey; and Baily,
British Policy.

2. Farman-Farmayan, “Forces of Modernization”; Millspaugh, Americans in
Persia; Richard, Entre l’Tran.

3. See Agnouche, Histoire politique du Maroc, pp. 307ff.

NOTES 243

. See Yapp, Modern Near East, p. 181.
See Cohen, “Thailand, Burma and Laos.”
Ibid., pp. 200-201; Sarkisyang, Buddhist Background, pp. 95-110.
. See Umegaki, After the Restoration, and Akamatsu, Meiji.
. Kawano, “La Révolution frangaise et Meiji Ishin,” p. 52.
. See, in particular, Beasley, Mevyi Restoration.
ro. Giannini, “La costituzione della Transgiordania.” On the constitution of
1951, see V.E_D., May 1952.
11. Abu-Hakima, Modern History of Kuwait, Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy.”
12. Kochanek, Congress Party of India.
13. Onthe construction of politics in India, see in particular Heesterman, /nner
Conflict of Tradition.
14. Sen, Reaping the Green Revolution; Advani, Influence of Socialism.
15. Mandaza, Zimbabwe; Moyona, Political Economy of Land.
16. Yapp, Modern Near East, pp. 202-10.
17. Ibid., pp. 199-200.
18. Ibid., pp. 335ff.
1g. See Khayr Ed-Din, Essaz.
20. Lapidus, “Islam and Modernity,” pp. 97ff.
21. Ibid., pp. 96ff.
22. Shamir, “Historical Traditions and Modernity,” pp. rarff.
23. Srinavas, “A Note.”

mC om naw +

24. Baduel, Le monde musulman, pp. 6-7.

25. Interview with Hajj Seyyed Javadi, October 25, 1990.

26. Aktar, L’Occidentalisation de la Turquie, pp. 50ff.

27. I refer here to the work of Irene Fenoglio, research fellow at the CEDEJ in
Cairo.

28. Raouf, Nouveau regard, pp. 134-35.

29. Interview with Abol Hassan Banisadr, November 1990.

30. Banerjea, Nation in the Making.

31. On Radhakrishnan, see Samartha, /ntroduction to Radhakrishnan.

32. Sen, History of Bengali Literature.

33. Lavelle, La pensée politique, pp. 10-13; Najita, Japan.

34. Lavelle, La pensée politique, p. 14.

35. Interview with Abol Hassan Banisadr.

36. Jaffrelot, Des nationalistes.

37. Interviews by Pic-Sernaglia with two mujahideen militants (January and Feb-
ruary 1991).

38. Addi, “Religion et politique.”

244 NOTES

39. See Richard, L’/slam chiite, pp. 93ff.

40. Mishra, RSS; Jaffrelot, Des nationalistes.

41. Goyal, Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, pp. 156-57.

42. Ibid., pp. 162ff.

43. Nahnah, interview. See also Al Ahnaf, Botiveau, and Fregoli, L Algerie par
ses islamistes.

44. Burgat, L’/slamisme au Maghreb, p. 32.

45. Ibid., p. 68.

46. Interview with Abol Hassan Banisadr, November 1990.

Chapter 4

. Lipset and Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures.”

. On this subject, see Badie, “L’Analyse des partis politiques.”
. Buijtenhuijs, “Des résistances aux indépendances,” pp. 48ff.
. See in particular Roberts, Creation of Modern Syria, pp. r8ff.
. See Rudebeck, Party and People.

. Coulon, “Religions et politique,” p. gr.

. Tordoff, “Political Parties in Zambia.”

. See Leca and Vatin, L Algérie politique, p. 35.

. Hinnebusch, “Political Parties in the Arab States.”

10. Tordoff, “Political Parties in Zambia,” p. 177.

66 “OORN) TOs Ol GRY "So

11. Thanks to Guy Hermet for this analysis.

12. World Bank, Rapport, p. 149.

13. Darbon, “Administration et société,” p. 175.

14. Darbon, “Le Paradoxe administratif,” p. 98.

15. Martin, Zanzanie, pp. 96ff.

16. Le Roy, “Les usages politiques du droit,” p. 119.

17. Riggs, “Bureaucrats and Political Development,” pp. 148-49. See also La
Palombara’s introduction to Bureaucracy and Political Development.

18. Bugnicourt, “Action administrative et communication.”

19. Banfield, Moral Basis.

20. Darbon, “Administration et société,” p. 56.

21. Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress; Martin, Tanzanie, p. 175.

22. Darbon, “Le Paradoxe administratif,” pp. 232ff. On the example of Senegal,
see also Waterbury and Gersovitz, Risk and Choice in Senegal.

23. See Ayubi, Bureaucracy and Politics in Contemporary Egypt.

24. Martin, “Par-dela le boubou et la cravate.”

25. Mousseron, “La réception,” pp. 38ff.

26. David, Les Grands systémes, pp. 516-18.

NOTES 245

27. Le Roy, “Les usages politiques du droit,” p. 113.

28. Mozaffari, La Naissance, pp. 11 and 16-17.

29. Gernet, Le Monde chinois, pp. 549-50.

30. David, Les Grands systémes, pp. 5471f.; Moitry, Le Droit japonais.

31. Pons, “Consensus et idéologie,” p. 58.

32. Lavelle, La pensée politique, pp. 41-42.

33. Ibid., p. 72.

34. Pons, “Consensus et idéologie,” p. 53.

35. Lavelle, Les Textes.

36. Apter, Pour l’Etat contre l’Etat, pp. 195ff.

37. Le Roy, “Les usages politiques du droit,” pp. 117-18.

38. Mousseron, “La réception,” pp. 63-65.

39. Ibid., pp. 70-72.

40. On Egypt, see Botiveau, “Faits de vengeance.” On sub-Saharan Africa, see
Le Roy, “Les usages politiques du droit.”

41. See Badie, “Démocratie et religion.”

42. See Hermet, Le Peuple contre la démocratie.
43. Mozaffari, “La problématique,” pp. 707ff.

|
1

Part Three

1. Bayart, L’Etat en Afrique, pp. 27ff.

Chapter 5

1. Fauré, “Eléments d’analyse,” pp. 336f.
2. Onthe new social movements, see Offe, ““New Social Assessments”; Melucci,
“Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements.”
. Mozaffari, La Naissance, pp. 34-35.
. Zghal, “Le retour du sacré,” p. 61.
See Botiveau, “De nouveaux modes de contestation.”
. Jaffrelot, “Les émeutes.”
Ibid.; Banerjee, “Hindutva.”
. Rajakovic, “Yugoslavie.”

0 ON AML w

. Coulon, “La sharia dans tous ses Etats.”

10. Bouissou,” Mécontentement, désaccord et stabilité,” p. 245.

11. Baduel, “Le front de l’Etat,” p. 149.

12. See Whitten, Cultural Transformations, and Le Bot, “Le destin de l’Amérique
latine.”

13. Bach, “Les frontiéres du régionalisme.”

246 NOTES

14. Le Guennec-Coppens and Caplan, Les Swahili entre Afrique et Arabie.

15. Constantin, “Communautés musulmanes.”

16. Majul, “Iranian Revolution,” pp. 277ff.

17. Ramazani, “Iran’s Export of the Revolution,” p. 48.

18. Walder, Communist Neo-traditionalism.

19. See Lafont, Les Frontieres du Vietnam, pp. 15-16.

20. Onthese questions, see in particular Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia,
and Trolliet, “Les Chinois.” %

a1. As seen by Geertz. See Geertz, Agricultural Involution and Old Societies and
New States.

22. Darbon, LAdministration et le paysan.

23. Leca and Vatin, “Social Structure and Political Stability.”

24. Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism and National Populism; Touraine, La
Parole et le Sang.

25. On the populist movements in Latin America, see Castro Rea, Ducaten-
zeiler, and Faucher, “La tentacion.”

26. On the Philippines, see particularly Burton, /mpossible Dream.

27. Regarding Burkino Faso, see Otayek, “Rectification.”

28. Hermet, “L’Amérique latine.”

2g. See Jaffrelot, “La place de |’Etat.”

30. Jelavich, History of the Balkans and “Balkan Intellectuals.”

31. Baduel, “Le front del’Etat,” p. 148.

32. Van Bruinessen, “Kurdish Society,” p. 51.

33. Le Monde, January 25, 1992.

34. See Chabal, Political Domination in Africa.

35. See Diamond, “Nigeria,” pp. 56ff.

36. Zghal, “Le retour du sacré,” p. 63.

Chapter 6

1. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics; Zacher, “Decaying Pillars.”
2. Badie and Smouts, Le Retournement du monde.
3. Nordenstreng and Schiller, National Sovereignty and International Commu-
nication.
4. See in particular Boyd-Barrett, “Cultural Dependency and the Mass-media.”
. See in particular Uche, Mass-media.

. On India, see Malik, Traditional Forms.

5

6. Hamelink, Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications.

7

8. Engineer, “Tragedy of Baghalpur Riots” and “Making of the Hyderabad Riots.”

NOTES 247

g. “Saudi Arabia,” in Piscatori and Harris, Law, Personalities and Politics.
10. Lafont, Les Frontiéres du Vietnam, pp. 17-23; Dharma, “Les frontiéres du
Campa,” pp. 128ff.
11. Rawls, A Theory of Justice.
12. See Baduel, “La guerre contestataire.”
13. Onthese mobilizations, see Burgat, “La part des islamistes,” in L’/slamisme
au Maghreb, pp. 75-78.
14. Injust the most recent literature on this subject, see Roff, /s/am, and Hunter
Shiren, Politics of Islamic Revivalism.
15. See Flory, Annuaire frangais de droit international, pp. 102-3.
16. See Balta, Le Grand Maghreb, and Sadik, Le Grand Maghreb.
17. See Postel-Vinay, “L’Asie dans l’amphithéatre japonais,” p. 26.
18. See Bouissou, “La puissance politique,” pp. 451ff., and Postel-Vinay,
“Anachronique dépendance diplomatique,” p. 22.
19. Bozarslan, “Turquie,” pp. 46ff.
20. Ibid., pp. 37-46.
21. See Leca and Vatin, “Social Structure and Political Stability,” and Birnbaum,
Dimensions.
22. See “Des ethnies,” in Baduel, Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditer-
ranée.
23. Onthese questions, see Bloom, Personal Identity, particularly chaps. 2 and 5.

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Index

Abbas, Ferhat, 126

Abbasid empire, 74; dar al islam and,
39

Abdel Aziz, 106

Abdel Madjid I, Khatt-e-Sharif and,
105

Abd el-Malik, Caliph, 74

Abduh, 124, 129, 162

Abdul Hamid II, 97

Accommodation, 41, 42, 43

Adaptation, 2, 144

Afghani, Djamal ed-Din Al-, 124, 129,
161

Aflak, Michel, 119

AFP, 205

African Independence Party of Guinea-
Bissau (PAIGC), 134

Aga Khan, 118

Agricultural sector, 17-18, 103, 145,
187

Ahval, Terjumani, 119

Akbar III, 69

Akhbaris, politics and, 126

Al-Barzani, Mustafa, 225

Al-Bustani, Boutros, 120

Al-Fassi, Allal, 67

Algerian People’s Party, 125

Allegiance, 64, 175, 202-3, 230

Allende, Salvador, 36

Al-Mahdi, Sadik, 67

Almond, Gabriel, 51

Al-Sabah, Abdallah al-Salem, ror

Al-Sabah family, 29

Al-Sayyadi, Abdul Khoda, 97

Amane, Nishi, 122

Amnesty International, 85

Amr, importance of, 126

Andean Pact, 222

Anglo-Iranian Company, nationaliza-
tion of, 19

AP, 205

Appeal to Youth (Chen Duxiu), 57

Apter, David, 151

Aquino, Corazon, 192

Arabism, 124, 126, 129

Arab League, 82, 183, 217

Arab nationalism, 108, 109

Arab Socialist Union (USA), 137

Arab Syrian Congress, 120

Armenian issue, 62, 110, 209, 230

262

Aron, Raymond, 12; interstate model
by, 58

Arya Samaj sect, 69, 70

ASEAN, 222

Asian culture, Western culture and,
118

Association for Human Rights, 85

Association of Cantonese Merchants,
77

Association of Democratic Jurists, 85

Association of Lawyers, 85

Association of Turk Derneye, 120

Association of Writers, 85

Associative networks, rise of, 196-97

Authoritarianism, 52, 139, 197; de-
pendence and, 21

Authority: importation of, 169; legiti-
macy and, 101

Avadi resolution (1955), 103

Avoidance logic, 154, 155

Ayan, 100, 194

Ayodhia temple, 174, 174n

Azawed Liberation Front, 65

Ba’ath Party, 67, 115, 120, 133, 138,
139, 140, 156; Alaouite minority and,
15; Taef accords and, 226

Bakhtiar, Shapur, government by, 161

Bandung conference, 193

Banerjea, Surendranath, nationalism
and, 121

Banfield, on clientelism, 16

Banisadr, Abol Hassan, rar, 130; on
Khomeini, 124

Barre, Siad, 195

Baule summit, 106

Bayart, Jean-Francois, hypothesis of,
167

Bazargan, Nehdi, 117, 1r7n

BBC, impact of, 206

Bell, Daniel, 49

Benahdj, FIS and, 200

INDEX

Ben Ali, President, price increases by,
44

Ben Badis, Abdelhamid, 125, 126

Ben Bella, 156, 157

Ben Salah, Ahmed: socialist develop-
ment and, 44

Bentham, Jeremy, 123, 147

Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), 128,
178, 179, 209, 219; identity-based
demands and, 176

Bhutto, populism and, 190

Bilateralism, 27, 37, 41, 42, 43, 221

BJP. See Bharatiya Janta Party

Bouissou, Jean-Marie, 179

Boumédienne, political populism of,
192

Bourgeot, André, on nomadic move-
ments, 65

Bourguiba, Habib, 18, 84, 158; Bizerte
and, 19; Destour reform and, 134,
137; political populism of, 192; PSD
and, 140; socialist development and,
44

Brady plan, 42-43

Brahmo Samaj sect, 69

British-Persian treaty (1814), internal
affairs and, 37

Brussels Commission, resolution and,
42

Buddhism: reintroduction of, 97-98;
Tamils and, 61; Theravada, 160

Bull, Hedley, on anarchic society, 35

Bureaucracy: access to, 142-43; im-
ported, 146; nationalist behavior
and, 109; social life and, 143;
universal /abstract rationality and,
141; universal/particularist conflict
and, 145; Weberian concept of, 145;
westernizing, 109

Bush, George, 39, 42-43

CACU, model for, 104

INDEX

Callaghy, formula of, 14

Capitalism, ro, 11, 36, 150

Captured peasantry, 144

Cardoso, 11, 16, 20, 22

Carter, Jimmy, 106

Castro, Fidel, 216

Catholic Church, 60, 160, 180

Cavadia, Marie, 120

Cavallo, Domingo, 191

CDT, 173

Chadli, political populism of, 192

Charlemagne, 74

Charter Act (1833), 146

Chen Duxiu, 57

Chevrier, Yves, 55

Chiang Kai-shek, Song bank and, 149

Chikao, Fujisawa, on Hitler/Confu-
clanism, I5I

Chimborazo Indians, 180

China: dependence and, 39; Gulf crisis
and, 38-40; as international force,
76; revolution in, 149; sociopolitical
reality and, 54; Western treaties and,
76-77. See also Sino-American rela-
tions

Chinguiti oasis, dispute over, 63-64

Chomin, Nakae, 123

Christianity, 108, 196; contradictory
experiences of, 159-60

Chukoku-Ha sect, 175

Chulalongkorn, 97

Citizenship, 60, 66, 178; allegiance
and, 54, 202; crisis of, 171, 179, 181,
208, 227; forced/artificial, 196; free
mobility and, 154; identification and,
177, 180, 202; imported idea of, 185;
rejection of, 65

Civic integration, model of, 50

Civil codes, 149, 150, 152, 153

Civil obedience, universalism and, 154

Civil procedure, codes of, 147, 149, 150

Civil society, 53, 59, 84, 114, 182, 197,

263

222-23; clientelist bonds and, 224;
constitution of, 84; fragmenting of,
80; innovation and, 198; missing,
83-87; social spaces and, 49, 79;
territoriality and, 59

Clientelism, 24, 26, 27, 29, 38, 47, 54,
86, 185, 187, 189, 204, 205, 208,
214; American/Soviet, 25; civil
society and, 224; dependence and,
33-34; precariousness and, 16

Client sovereignty, strategy of, 34

Client states: influence of, 26; patron
states and, 24-34

Code of Commerce (1850), 148

Code of Inheritance and Alimony
(1951), 153

Codes, 146, 147, 148; creation of,
149-50

Cohong monopoly, 77

Collectivities, identification toward,
184

Collor plan, 43

Colonialism, 11, 34, 61, 113; end of, 1;
nationalist behavior and, 110; politi-
cal mechanisms and, 12

Colonization, 7, 38, 98, 142

Commercial codes, 148, 149, 150

Commercial Procedure Code (1860),
148

Common law, 152, 153; Muslim, 146; in
sub-Saharan Africa, 147-48

Communal culture, 60, 65-66; territo-
rial affiliation for, 63

Communalization: effects of, 108; lib-
eration of modes of, 132; political,
188, 220; redefinition of, 157; re-
gional, 220

Communes, 66, 170

Communication, 3, 36, 183, 202, 205,
217; mastery of, 35; social networks
and, 136

Communitarianism, 55, III, 160, 206,

264

229; fusional, 150, 151; institutional-
ization of, 181; pan-Islamic, 209;
residual, 83

Community, 15; identity and, 60; inter-
national, 215, 217; of pain, 220; ter-
ritory and, 60-61; of usefulness, 220

Comte, Auguste, 95

Conference of Non-Aligned States
(1973), 205

Congress of Baku, 13

Congress of Berlin, Africa and, 12

Congress Party, 128, 133, 140, 156, 157,
179; agricultural socialization and,
103; importation and, 174; intellec-
tuals in, 121; nationalism and, 102,
203; third-world diplomacy of, 216

Conservative modernization, 94, 97,
III, 114-15; Meiji revolution and, 98,
99-100

Constantin, Francois, on associative
movement, 181

Constitutional law, 152; social crises
and, 156

Convention of Beijing (1860), 77

Coulon, Christian, 177; on counter-
society, 136

Counsel of Ministers (Brussels Com-
mission), resolution by, 42

Counterlegitimacy, 152, 172, 187

Countermobilization movements, 68,
215; identity-based, 210

Countersocialization, 36, 158

Cultural alienation, 214; logic of, 228;
protest wars and, 216

Cultural dependence, 3, 208; domina-
tors/dominated and, 234; interna-
tional order and, 233

Cultural dissonance, 91, 131, 153

Cultural identity, 182, 221, 223, 229,
231; Islam and, 199; sovereignty and,
86

Cultural inflows, 35-36, 219

INDEX

Culturalism: developmentalism and,
157-58, 159, 163-64; universalism
and, 235

Cultural models, 47, 169; diffusion of,
204

Cultural neonationalism, political/
social, 207

Cultural Revolution, 185

Cultural spaces, 50, 183, 224,226;
emergence of, 227; individualization
and, 228

Culture: civic, 51; dependence and,
233; displacement of, 50; of govern-
ment, 234; individual and, 229;
mobilization of, 183; political, 50;
primordialist vision of, 228. See also
Communal culture

Curiel, Henri, 120, 204

Daimyo, 99, 111

Dar al harb, 66,74

Dar alislam, 59, 66, 219; identification
through, 230

Darbon, Dominique, on bureaucratic
model, 142

Darwin, Charles, 56

Datsua Nyuo, doctrine of, 223

Datta, Michael Madhusudana, rar

Datta, Ramesh Chandra, 121-22

Dawle, Vosuq, 120

Decentralization, 95, 115, 137. 193. 194.
227; independence and, 142

Decolonization, 2, 7, 63, 73, 214, 228

De Gaulle, Charles, 169

Delegitimation, 19, 171

Democracy, 157, 158, 159, 160

Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG),
137,140

Democratic Party of Independence,
139

Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast
(PDCI), 137, 158, 170

INDEX

Democratization, 106, 159, 161, 169

Deng Xiaoping, 55

Dependence, 10, 13-14, 21, 23, 26, 29,
80, 105, 131, 138, 155, 196, 202, 204,
233; clientelist, 33-34; components
of, 32, 37; democracy and, 160; dom-
ination and, 48; effective/dynamic,
7, 48; globalization and, 3; importa-
tion and, 140, 151, 153; indirect ef-
fects of, 203; legitimation of, 43;
logic of, 12, 27, 30, 39, 40, 46, 47;
mechanism of, 11, 21; neopatrimoni-
alism and, 149; political foundations
of, 12-13, 20, 24, 42, 47; protest and,
233-34; reinforcing, 31, 146; resist-
ance to, 104; socioeconomic func-
tions and, 41; source of, 93-94; sov-
ereignty and, 86; state, 13-24, 34-37;
symbolism of, 77. See a/so Cultural
dependence; Economic dependence

Dependentist ideology, 20, 32, 116;
“development from underdevelop-
ment” thesis and, 22

Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian, 69

Destourian Socialist Party (DSP): for-
mation of, 44, 137; reform of, 134

Development: accommodation and,
42; financial support for, 141;
neopatrimonialism and, 19; political
strategy of, 22-23; rentier economy
and, 31; socialist, 44. See also Eco-
nomic development

Developmentalism, 1, 51-52; cultural-
ism and, 157-58, 159, 163-64; politi-
cal alienation and, 188; Western
models and, 131

“Development from underdevelop-
ment” thesis, 22

Dickens, Charles, 120

Differentiation, 115; strategy of, 197

Diplomacy, 37, 220; deception of, 38;
foreign policy and, 39, 40; interna-

265

tional order and, 210; non-Western,
214; particularism and, 211

Disorder: logic of, 207-9; strategies of,
214-18

Division of Labor in Society
(Durkheim), 50-51

Djamali, Mahamed Fadel, 67

Djevdet Pasha, Medjelle and, 146

Djeza’ara school, 200

Dominant, 234; clientelist relation
and, 214; dominated and, 13, 81;
supremacy of, 233

Dominated, 182, 234; cultural alien-
ation/exclusion and, 214; dominant
and, 13, 81

Domination, 67; dependence and, 48;
populism and, 190

Doubling, 9, 155, 184-85

Dowlat-e islami, 163

Dowreh, 15

Dragoumis, Ion, 193

DSP. See Destourian Socialist Party

Dual society, 85, 186

Durkheim, Emile, 50-51, 113

East and West in Religion (Radhakrish-
nan), 121

Eastern Religion and Western Thought
(Radhakrishnan), 121

East-West relations, 73, 81

Eckstein, Harry, 51

Economic dependence, 19, 208;
resource precariousness and, 16

Economic development, 229; anti-
imperialist discourse and, 102;
democracy and, 157; elites and, 19;
political dependence and, 23

Economic theory: failure of, 10-13;
Islamic, 129

Edict of Caracalla, 59

Effendi, Mazhar, 95

Effendi, Mustafa, 95

266 INDEX
Effendi, Reshvan, 95 FRELIMO, 134
Efkyar, Tasviri, 119 French Club, 204

Egalitarianism, 190, 191

Egyptian Central Security Force, 173

Elias, Norbert: on feudalism, 58

Elite, 30, 32, 224; economic develop-
ment and, 19; immigrant, 30; impor-
tation/subjugation and, 112; masses
and, 13; nationalist, 109, 110; politi-
cal, 19, 169; rivalries among, 136;
socialism and, 103; technocratic,
115; Westernization and, 113, 114

Eminescu, Mikhail, 194

Enlightenment, 1, 56, 83

En-Nadah, identity-based demands
and, 176

Essafsaf oasis, 221

European Community, 45, 221, 230;
integration and, 26

Exclusion, 212, 213, 214

Exportation, 41, 86; economy of, 22;
negative impact of, g1; tribal culture
and, 87

Fables (La Fontaine), 122

Fauré, Yves, on Ivory Coast elections,
170

Federal party, evolution of, 61

Fengtian government, 54, 55

Feudal logic, territory and, 58, 59

FIS, 162; Benahdj and, 200; identity-
based demands and, 176; political
debate and, 158

FLN, disappearance of, 115

Foreign policy, 34, 82-83; Chinese, 39,
40; clientelist logic and, 32; diplo-
matic sovereignty and, 39, 40

Formes élémentaires (Durkheim), 51

FOSS, 195

France 2, 204

Francis I, Sileyman treaty with, 37, 75

Freemasonry, 56, 57, 119, 203

Fujimori, Alberto, 21, 191; Cambio go
movement and, 180; election of, 189

Fukuyama, Francis, 49

Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 121, 123; Western
civilization/Japan and, 122n

Gadhafi, Muammar, 184, 1937°0n urban

society, 194
Galtung, 13, 27
Gandhi, Indira, 128, 158; Congress

Party and, 140; personalization of

power by, 103; populism of, 190
Gandhi, Mohandas, 128, 193
Gandhi, Rajiv, 103-4; assassination of,

127
Garcia, Alan, 189
Geertz, Clifford, 54
Gellner, Ernest, 54; on clandestine

self-administration, 145
Gemayel, Pierre, Phalanges and, 133
Getulism, 115; populism and, 190
Ghanushi, 121, 129
Globalization, 1-2, 7, 12, 34, 235;

dependence and, 3; economic,

201; forced, gt; singularity and, 3
Golwalkar, Madhav Sadashiv, 127, 128
Governed states, governing states

and, 168
Greek city, growth of, 48
Green March, 78
Guarani Indians, 180
Gulf crisis/Gulf War, 213, 215; diplo-

macy during, 29, 38-40, 216-17;

Kurdish refugees and, 226; populism

and, 214; Saudi Arabia and, 32;

United Nations and, 73
Gulf money, denouncing, 174, 176
Gunder-Frank, André, 20

Hadj, Messali, 126

INDEX

Hague convention (1907), piracy and, 78

Hamid, Abd al-Haqq, 120

Hamid, Abdul, 107, 109

Hamidiyya, creation of, 109

Han empire, Funan and, 74

Harare parliament, Land Acquisition
Bill and, 17

Hassan II, Green March and, 68

Havel, Vaclav, 117

Hawiye, CSU and, 195

Hedgewar, 127

Hegel, Friedrich, 182

Hegemony, 91; American, 11, 35;
economic development and, 10;
populism and, 190

Hermet, Guy, populism of, 192-93

Hinduism, 69, 86, 178

Hindu Marriage Act (1955), 147

Hindu nationalism, territorialization
and, 68

Hiroyuki, Katoa, 122

History: end of, 1, 49; varied/contra-
dictory directions for, 2

Hitler, Adolf, 150; Confucianism and,
151

Hobbes, Thomas, 123; hypothesis of,
52-53; on reason, 56; universalism
of, 55

Hobsbawm, Eric, 21

Home Rule, 61

Hong Kong, cession of, 76

Horizontal alliances, 15, 27, 198

Horizontal solidarities, 83, 132, 157

Houphouét-Boigny, Félix, 18, 52, 84,
133; PDCI and, 137

Hugo, Victor, 120

Human rights, 49, 84

Hume, Allan Octavian, Congress Party
and, 102

Hussein (martyr), 117

Hussein, Ahmad, Young Egypt Party
and, 133

267

Hussein, Saddam, 28, 173, 175, 184,
193, 202, 231; Ba?ath party and,
140; demonstration of consensus by,
161; Kuwait and, 68; populism and,
190, 214; territorial expansion/
popular mobilization and, 68

Hybridization, 151, 154, 163, 186, 188;
forced, 2; logic of, 167, 174

Hyden, Goran, 59; captured peasantry
and, 144

Ibn Khaldun, on communal groups,
54

IBRD. See International Bank of
Reconstruction and Development

Identification: allegiance and, 175;
citizenship and, 177, 180, 202;
formation of, 10g; multiple, 230;
political, 58; transnational, 182

Identity, 50, 51, 60-62, 114, 155, 196;
affirmation of, 176; communal, 54,
60, 227; as instrument of political
action, 234; Islamic, 173, 176; partic-
ularist, 83, 84; populism and, 190;
political, 18, 20, 58, 177; quest for,
234; rediscovery of, 190; rejection/
recomposition of, 174; socialist,
135; state and, 49; threat to, 167;
Westernization and, 120. See also
Cultural identity

Identity-based expression, 173, 174,
226; officialization of, 181-82

Identity-based mobilization, 186, 187,
193, 202; populism and, 190

Identity parties, 175, 207; function of,
177-78; irruption of, 177, 179

IGOs, 220

IHD. See Indicators of human develop-
ment

IMF. See International Monetary Fund

Imperialism, 12, 13, 35, 36, 124; capi-
talism and, 10; economic theory of,

268

10; market effects of, 11; recourse to,
183-84; struggle against, 19-20

Importation, 118, 123, 125, 150, 156-
64, 174, 177, 186; conservation and,
94-101; dependence and, 140, 151,
153; effects of, 168; functioning and,
142; logic of, 86, 93; revolutions
and, 101-5; social movements and,
172; strategies, 94, 203; subjugation
and, 112; tribal culture and, 87;
westernization and, 112

Imported state, European state and,
195

Importing class, creation of, 112-16

Incorporation, 9; forced, 13

Independence, 18, 98, 141, 154; decen-
tralization and, 142; nationalism
and, 156; Western influence and, ror

India: crisis of legitimacy in, 174;
socialism in, 18

Indian Association, 121

Indian identity, 69, 70

Indian law, 156; British juridicial
culture and, 147

Indian nationalism: Congress Party
and, 102; intellectuals and, 121

Indian Union, 230

Indicators of human development
(IHD), GNP and, 31

Individualism, 26, 55, 155, 229

Individualization, 58; cultural spaces
and, 228; natural law and, 72

Industrial sector, 10, 124; socialization
of, 103; in Zimbabwe, 17-18

Industries Act, state licensing and, 103

Inequality: dependence and, 46; sym-
bolism of, 77

Infitah, 116, 116n

Innovation, 2, 200; civil society and,
198; localism and, 199

Institutionalization, 12, 46, 75, 182,
183, 186, 204

INDEX

Intellectuals: importing, 116-23; west-
ernized, 116, 120; Western models
and, 93

Internal affairs, 201; intervening in, 37

International Bank of Reconstruction
and Development (IBRD), 41

International Confederation of Human
Rights, 85

International Court of Justice,'\Chin-
guiti group and, 63

International disorder, 210, 214, 231;
terrorist movements and, 232

Internationalism, 27, 222

International law, 40, 75, 76, 79, 214;
birth of, 70-71; invoking, 210; Iran
and, 211; transcultural, 73; univer-
salization of, 71, 74, 85

International Monetary Fund (IMF),
41, 45, 135. 142; adjustment policies
of, 191; Algeria and, 221; depend-
ence and, 42; Tunisia and, 43

International order: critique of, 212,
213; cultural dependence and, 233;
diplomatic action and, 210; division
of, 219; durability of, 232; forced
westernization of, 213; innovation
for, 220; loss of meaning for, 201;
security and, 210

International relations: obligation in,
72; power and, g; principles of, 78;
state model and, 80; universalization
of, 218

International system: apprenticeship
of, 74-75; interstate system as, 80

Interstate system, 80, 211; construc-
tion of, 77-78; universalization of, 85

Invention, 168, 218

Iran. See Islamic Republic of Iran

Iranian revolution (1906), 118, 172

Iranian revolution (1979). See Islamic
revolution

Iron law, 143

INDEX

Islam: orthodox/mystical, 97; univer-
salist orientation of, 67

Islamic Conference, 183, 219; charter
supulations of, 220

Islamic culture: universality and, 87;
Western culture and, 235

Islamic law, 153, 210

Islamic modernity, Western modernity
and, 158

Islamic movements, 128, 157, 178, 216,
217; countermobilization strategies
and, 68; foundation of, 179; micro-
communitarian solidarity/mutual
help and, 194; sovereignty and, 66;
state models and, 129-30

Islamic Party of the Republic (PRI),
138, 139

Islamic Republic of Iran: confrontation
with, 217; constitutional referendum
by, 160; constitution of, 184; execu-
tive class of, 35; international law
and, 211; Kurdish rebellion against,
225

Islamic revivalism, 69, 162, 200

Islamic revolution (1979), 116, I17n,
118, 124-25, 172-73

Islamic Salvation Movement, 129; NLF
and, 135

Ispahan Opium Company, 148

Istiglal, 156

Italian Fascist Party, 133

Ivory Coast: elections in, 170; price
regulation in, 16

Jackson, Robert: on quasi-nations/
negative sovereignty, 80

Jacobins, 152, 227

Jana Sangh, 124, 128; RSS and, 158

Japan, ITI-12, 223

Japanese constitution (1889), Prussian
model and, 99

Javadi, Hajj Seyyed, 85; itinerary of,

269

116-17; on nationalism, 119; on secu-
larism, 118

Jus loci, jus sanguinis and, 60

Kabir, Amir, 96

Kabisig, Aquina and, 192

Kameiny, Ayatollah, rr7n

Karpatri, Dharma Sangh de Svami, 124

Katt-e Homayyun, 106

Kaunda, President, 140

Keita, Modibo, 133

Kelsenian normativism, 73

Kemal, Mustafa, 141

Kemalist party, 157; Kurdish question
and, 226

Khatt-e-Sharif (Abdel Madjid I and
Rashid Pasha), 105

Khayred-Din, 120; importation by, 112

Kher, Amy, 120

Khomeini, Ayatollah, 25, 66, 121, 124,
127, 139, 184, 200; fundamentalism
and, 130; imported institutions and,
162-63; Iranian revolution and, 116;
Javadi and, 117

Kimbanguism, political debate and,
158

Koenkai, 179

Kokka, 151

Kokusaika, 222

Komeito, 157, 213; foundation of, 179;
political debate and, 158

Koussi and Theophilatkos, monopoly
by, 148

Kurdish identity, 61-62, 63, 225;
Hamidiyya and, 109

Kurdish issue, 85, 209, 225, 226-27;
elimination/marginalization of, 63

Kurdish movement, 79, IIO-II, 225

Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, 225

Kurdish state, 111, 196

Kurdistan, 62-63, 111

Kurds, 208; Ottoman empire and, 195;

270

tribalism among, 108; United
Nations and, 226
Kushans, Han empire and, 74

Lahidji, Association for Human Rights
and, 85

Lancaster House accords, 104

Land Acquisition Bill (1992), 17

Lapidus, Ira: on Ottoman empire/
westernization, 112-13

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 71

Latin America: domination of, g; im-
portation by, 91; populism in, 189

Law: administrative, 152; imported,
146-56; jacobinization of, 152; of
practice, 147; religious, 177; return
to, 162; social, 152; valorization of,
212; westernization of, 148, 149-50.
See also Common law; International
law

Lawyers Association, 197

LDP. See Liberal Democratic Party

Lebanese Christians, Taef accords and,
226

Legitimacy, 152, 159; authority and,
to1; crisis of, 174; developmentalist
political science and, 52; rational-
legal, 49

Lenin, Vladimir, 10-11, 26

Le Play, Frédéric, 113, 113n

Le Roy, Etienne, 143, 152

Leviathan (Hobbes), 52

Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 179

Liberalism, 36, 44-45

Li Jiachen, 185

Localism, 193, 194, 199

Louisiana Constitution (1950), Article
372 of, 147

Louisiana penal code, Napoleonic
influence on, 147

“Lumpen-nomadic” collectivity, 65

Luxemburg, Rosa, 11

INDEX

Macaulay, Lord, 147

MacBride, Sean, 205

Maga, Hubert, 133

Mahabharata, translation of, 122

Mahasabha, 124

Mahatir, Prime Minister, 67

Mahmoud II, 94; sheykh-al-islam and,
107

Maitatsine sect, 135 *

Malian Adrar, autonomy of, 65

Malinke, 140

Mamichi, Tsuda, 122

“Man and Liberty” (Nasser), 120

Manchu dynasty, 75, 76

Mandingo people, 202

Maraboutism, 135, 173

Mardom Party, 139

Maritime law (1864), 148

Marja’ taqlid, 126

Martin, Denis, 144

Marxism, 18, 115

Masses: elites and, 13; nationalist
ideologies and, 109

Mawdudi, 124

Media imperialism thesis, problems
with, 206-7

Medjelle, 146, 155

Mehemet-Ali, 94, 95

Meiji period, 94, 111, 121, 203; conser-
vative modernization during, 98,
99-100; imperialism during, 223:
westernization in, 96-97

Melli Party, 139

Mendes France, Pierre, 117

Menem, Carlos, 21, 191; Brady plan
and, 43

Mercosur, 222

Messianism, 194, 196

Microcommunitarian solidarities,
184-85, 187, 198, 209; economies
of, 16

Microdecisions, 199, 202

INDEX

Midhat Pasha, financial crisis and, 106

Migdal, Joel, 79

Mill, John Stuart, 56, 95, 123

Mindon Min, King: Western influence
and, 98

Minorities, 209, 226; Muslim, 208,
226; in Ottoman empire, 108

Mitterand, Francois, Baule summit
and, 106

Mobilization, 171-78, 207, 215, 228,
231; electoral, 132, 170; identity,
186, 190, 193, 202, 234; political,
131; populist, 28; social, 109

Mobutu, President, 156

Modernization, 18, 50, 96, 212; accept-
ance of, 51; Hindu, 158; ideology,
192; Islamic, 158; Western models
of, 55, 206. See also Conservative
modernization

Mongkut, 97

Montesquieu, 56, 117, 123

Morgenthau, Hans, 12

Mossadegh, 118; Anglo-Iranian Com-
pany and, 19; nationalization by,
30-31; ouster of, 116

Movement for Liberty and People’s
Rights, 121

Movement of Nonaligned Nations, 79

MPLA. See People’s Movement for the
Liberation of Angola

MPS, 195

MTI, 158, 173, 176

Mugabe, Robert: Marxist
discourse/symbolism and, 105;
ZANU and, 104, 134

Muhammad, Prophet, 74

Multilateralism, 35, 221, 222, 235;
patron states and, 41; socioeconomic
functions and, 43

Multiparty system, 106, 161, 179; in
Egypt, 139

Muslim brotherhoods, 127, 162, 196,

271

208, 216; identity-based demands
and, 176
Muslim minorities, 208, 226
Mustafa IV, assassination of, 95
Mzali, Prime Minister, 192

Nahnah, Mahfoud: on state, 129

Naidu, Sarojini, 121

Nakamura, 123

Nanking regime, codes of, 149

Napoleonic Civil Code, 146

Nagqshbandi order, common bond for,
62

Naseredin Shah, elite and, 96

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 16, 28, 35, 82,
120, 137, 184; agrarian reforms and,
187; on feudalism/imperialism, 52;
nationalist diplomacy of, 216; pan-
Arab movement of, ror; populism
and, 190; socialism and, 18; Suez
canal and, 19, 68

National Development Council, 103

National Farmer Association of Zim-
babwe (NFAZ), 104

Nationalism, 21, 35, 110N, 129, 132,
150; Arab, 108, 109; colonialism
and, 110; independence and, 156; in
India, 68, 102, 121, 203; in Japan,
151; in Ottoman empire, 108; pop-
ulism and, 190; symbols of, 30-31;
variations of, 192; Western construc-
tion of, 119

Nationalism (Tagore), 121

Nationality: challenging, 229; cultural/
political, 126

Nationalization, 30, 103, 105

National League for the Defense of
Human Rights, 117

National sovereignty, 9, 160; illusion
of, 10; state sovereignty and, 80

Nation in the Making, A (Banerjea),
121

272

Nation-state logic, transnational logic
and, 168

Nation-state model, reproduction of,
78-79

Natural law, 73; individualization and,
72

Ndebele, Shona and, 134, 198

Negotiation, principle of, 78

Nehru, Jawahrlal, 35, 156; agrarian
revolution and, 187; Congress Party
and, 102; Goa and, 19; Planning
Commission and, 103; socialism
and, 18

Neighborhood movements, 151

Neo-Destour, 134; Sahelians and, 15;
transformation of, 44, 137

Neoliberalism, 41, 43, 44, 115, 153

Neopatrimonialism, 14-15, 16, 22, 24,
30, 163, 193, 197, 198; civilservants
and, 188; dependence and, 149;
development and, 19

Neopopulism, 129, 171

Neotraditionalism, 185, 219

New Caledonia, United Nations and, 25

Newly industrializing nations (NINs);
economic transformations of, 23;
rise of, 21-22

NFAZ. See National Farmer Associa-
tion of Zimbabwe

NGOs. See Nongovernmental organiza-
tions

Nichiren, 177

NINs. See Newly industrializing
nations

Nkomo, Josué: ZAPU and, 134

Nkrumah, Nkwame, 28; client sover-
eignty and, 34; symbols of struggle
and, 19

NLF, 45, 126, 138, 156; as intermediary
organization, 139; Islamic Salvation
Movement and, 135; Leninist model
and, 134

INDEX

Nomads, dilemma for, 64-65

Nonalignment, 193, 214, 214

Nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), 196, 220; limitations on,
19; professional associations and,
84

Noninterference, principle of, 79

Noriega, Manuel, 218

North, 3; defined, 2n; elites of ;13;
models from, 46; South and, 13, 14,
73

North African Star, 125

Northcote-Trevelyan report (1854),
141

NSDAP, 133

O’Donnell, Guillermo: authoritarian-
ism and, 21

Ogodenis, opposition by, 82, 195

Oil: dependence situations and, 29;
nationalization of, 30

Omeyyad empire, dar alislam and, 59

ONG, 145-46

“Open Letter to the Army” (Javadi),
117

Ottoman empire, 94; importation by,
II2-I3; international system and,
108; Kurds and, 63, 195; nationalism
in, 108; Westernization and, 96, 99.
100, II2

Ovid, 121

Pacta sunt servanda, 74

Padri movement, 113

Pahlavi dynasty, 108, 130

PAIGC. See African Independence
Party of Guinea-Bissau

Pan-Arab movement, ror

Panchayati-raj, 184, 193

Pan-Hindu movement, identity-based
protest and, 181

Pan-Islamism, 230; denunciation

INDEX

of, 209; Hindu reaction to, 174;
identity-based protest and, 181; rise
of, 176

Pan-Turkism, 184, 219, 230

Particularism, 15, 94, 181, 182, 185,
193, 219, 228, 229, 234; communal,
84; diplomatic discourse and, 217;
exclusion and, 12; glorification of,
168; infra-state, 219; revitalization
of, 220

Parti démocratique de Guinée équatori-
ale, 158

Parti démocratique gabonais, 158

Parties: in developing countries,
139-40; functional deficit for, 138;
identity for, 134-35; as instruments
of rupture, 136; in noncompetitive
system, 138

Partisanship, 132, 138, 140, 179

Patrimonialism, 15, 24, 48, 149. See
also Neopatrimonialism

Patronage, 26, 139-40, 170; adjust-
ment policies and, 42; American,
33> 35

Patron states: client states and, 24-34,
4I

Paz Zamora, President, 180

PDCI. See Democratic Party of the
Ivory Coast

PDG. See Democratic Party of Guinea

Peace of Westphalia (1648), 12, 60, 77,
210

Penados, Prospero, 36

Penal codes, 147, 150

People’s Agrarian Movement, recon-
struction of, 139

People’s Movement for the Liberation
of Angola (MPLA), 134

Peripheral societies: adaptation by, 2;
awakening of, 233; loss of power in,
11; political production of, 167

Peronism, I15, 189, 190

273

Persia, westernization in, 95-96

Persian revolution (1906), 118, 172

Pirnia, 118

Planning Commission (India), five-year
plans and, 103

PME, 45

Political communalization, 188, 220

Political debate, 234; democracy and,
159

Political dependence, 42, 224; eco-
nomic transformation and, 23

Political innovation, 51, 62, 168;
blocking, 164

Political order: overcoming, 102;
transformation of, 11

Political space, 83; social actors and,
198; unification of, 113

Politics, 188; administration and,
140-41; contradictory forces of, 28;
dependence relations and, 20;
imported, 131-36; instrumental/
functional conception of, 20;
recomposition of, 170-71

Populism, 21, 188-93, 194, 218; secu-
lar, 32; tribune-based, 129. See also
Neopopulism

Positivism, 56, 72, 95; in Egypt, 113; in
Turkey, 119

Power, 91; concentration of, 139; con-
frontation of, 81; effective/dynamic,
48; equality of, 196; international
relations and, 9; neopatrimonial
construction of, 14; state monopoly
on, 95; territory and, 36-37

Power actors, described, 93-94

PPA, 126

Press agencies, quasi-monopoly for,
205

PRI. See Islamic Party of the Republic

Private space, public space and, 225

Privatization, 43, 135, 198; adaptation
and, 144; Algeria and, 221; corrup-

274

tion and, 144; in Mahgrebian states,
45

Professional associations, NGOs and,
84

Property code, 149

Protest, 123, 215, 218, 232; authoritar-
ian nature of, 172; dependence and,
233-34; identity-based, 181; internal,
201; Islamic, 124; tribunes and, 217

Protestant Ethic, The (Weber), 50

Protesters, 123-30

Protest wars, 215, 216

Providence states, rise of, 31

PSD, 140

Public law, 152, 155, 205

Public services, 42

Public space, 37, 49, 112, 119, 182;
Arab nationalism and, 109; private
space and, 225; Western law and,
154

Pye, Lucian, 51

Qadi, 181
Qadjar dynasty, 107-8, 195
Quian Quichen, 39

Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 121

Radio Free Europe, 204

Radwan, Fathi, 133

Rama I, 9, 128, 174n, 178; Buddhism
and, 97

Ramayana, translation of, 121

Rao, Narasimha, 104

Rashid Pasha, Khatt-e-Sharif and, 105

Rashtriya Swayamsewak Association
(RSS), 127-28, 157, 158, 178, 179,
193; identity-based demands and,
176; Jana Sangh and, 158

Rassemblement démocratique africain
(RDA), 132, 156

Rassemblement démocratique
centrafricain, 158

INDEX

Rassemblement démocratique du
peuple camerounais, 158

Rassim, Georges, 120

Rationality, 123, 217

Rawls, John, 212

RDA. See Rassemblement démocra-
tique africain

Readjustment, patron states and, 41

Reappropriation, populist strategies
of, 207

Reason, 118; Hobbes on, 56

Recommunalization, 228

Reformation, 98, 160; Renaissance
and, 71

Regionalization, 218, 219-27

Relations: inequality of, 25-26; verti-
cality of, 26-27

Religion of Man, The (Tagore), 121

Renaissance: market capitalism in, 57;
Protestant Reformation and, 71

Rentier state, 32; allocation/distribu-
tion and, 31

Representative government, develop-
ment of, 160

Republic of Geneva, 160

Republic of Mahabad, 63

Resolution 618 (Security Council),
China and, 39

Resolution 678 (Security Council),
China and, 39-40

Restructuration, policies of, 43

Reuters, 205

Review of Year Six (Arinori), 122

Revivalist movements, 187, 215, 219,
229

Revolutions, 194; importation and,
TOI-5

Reza Shah, 117

Rida, Rashid, 124

Rifah party, 187

Rifai Alep order, 97

Riza, Ahmed, 119

INDEX

Rokkan, Stein, 131

Rosenau, James, 35, 202-3

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 117, 120, 123

Roy, Ram Mohan, 69

RSS. See Rashtriya Swayamsewak
Association

Sadat, Anwar: infitah and, 116n; liber-
alization policies by, 116; multiparty
system and, 106, 139, 161

Sadequiyyeh branch, 126

Sadigiyya, 134

Safavids, 118, 195

Saharan State, Libyan myth of, 65

Sahel, 140

Sahrawi identity, 64

Saint-Simonism, 56, 57, 113, 141; in
Egypt, 95, 119

Salar, Sepah, 96

Saltaneh, Qavam, 120

Samurai, 99, III

Sankara, populism and, 190

Sanrizuka movement, 151

Sassanid Persians, Tang dynasty and,
74

Scientism, 95

Sebastiani, Bastien, 94, 94n

Secularization, 107

Security, international order and, 210

Seigo, Nakono, 150

Self Help (Smiles), 123

Selim III, 94, 95

Serasvati, Dayananda, 69

Serrano, Jorge: election of, 180

Séve, Captain, 94

Seventh-Day Adventists, 175

SEZ. See Special economic zones

Shakespeare, William, 121

Sharia, 129, 176; revolution and, 172

Shari’at Madari, Ayatollah, 127

Sharif Pasha, 111

Shillal, 15

275

Shingalese nationalists, antiminority
sentiments of, 61

Shinkichi, Uesugi, 150

Shiva, 128, 178

Shona, Ndebele and, 134, 198

Siam, Westernization and, 97-99

Sikhs, 208

Sinasi, Ibrahim, 119, 120

Singh, Bharatiya Lok Dal de Charan,
124

Singularity, globalization and, 3

Sino-American relations, 39. See also
China

Sismondi, Jean, 149, 149n

Sixth Plan (1981), liberalization in, 43

Siyaad, President, 82

Smiles, Samuel, 123

Smith, Adam, 11, 149n

Smith, lan, 187

SNSP. See Syrian National Socialist
Party

Social bonds, 54, 183

Social Contract (Rousseau), 123

Social Democratic Populist Party, 226

Socialism, 18, 115, 116, 192; egalitarian
principles and, 102-3

Socialization, 157; control of, 205

Social justice, 160, 199

Social movements, 124; identity-based
expression of, 175, 176; importation
and, 172; in India, 174-75; legitimacy
for, [70-71

Social networks, communication and,
136

Social order, 23, 91

Social relations, individualization of,
14-15, 53> 83, 132

Social spaces, 114, 155; civil society
and, 79; empty, 186-88; internal, 24;
political communalization and, 188;
private, 83, 228; suburban, 187

Société generale of Iran, 148

276

Society of Getul, 133n

Society of Year Six, 122

Society of Young Arabs, 108

Socioeconomic functions, 41, 46

Socioeconomic structures, homoge-
nization of, 45

Sociological hypothesis, 52

Sociology, 50, 52

Solidarities: horizontal, 83, 132, 157;
microcommunitarian, 16, 184-85,
187, 198, 209; transnational, 202,
224; vertical, 132,144

Suleyman the Magnificent, Francois I
treaty with, 37, 75

Song bank, Chiang Kai-shek and, 149

South, 2, 3; elites of, 13; North and,
13,14

Sovereignty, 38, 79, 81, 118; cultural
identity and, 86; deceptions of,
37-47; dependence and, 86; na-
tional, 9, 10, 80, 160; natural right
to, 75; negative, 80; principle of,
72, 80, 205; rupture of, 228; spaces
of, 209; state and, 80, 86, 204-5,
208

Special economic zones (SEZ), 222

Spencer, Herbert, 56

Srinavas, M. N.: on Sanskritization,
114

State: cultural spaces and, 227; depen-
dence by, 13-24, 34-37; identity and,

49, 83; legitimacy and, 49; violence
and, 78; Western model of, 96-97
State logic, territory and, 59-60
State model, international relations
and, 80

State order, imperial order and, 183-84

State sovereignty, 86; national sover-
eignty and, 80; principle of, 204-5;
shrinkage of, 208

Stere, Constantin, 194

Strange, Susan: on global power, 34

INDEX

Structural adjustment, 115, 116

Substitution: formulas of, 167; legiti-
macy of, 189

Suez canal, 19, 68, 214

Sufi sects, 97; common bond for, 62

Sukarno, Ahmed, 18, 28, 35; symbols of
struggle and, 19

Symbolism: anti-imperialist, 19, 21;
Western-style, 114 *

Syrian National Socialist shoe (SNSP),

133
System of meanings, 66

Tagore, Rabindranath, 121

Tahtawi, Minister, 95, 120; importa-
tion by, 112

Takriti clan, 15, 140

Taleqani, 200

Tamanrasset, peace accord at, 65

Tamils, 60-61, 63, 85, 225

Tamil United Liberation Front, 61

Tang dynasty, 54; Sassanid Persians
and, 74

Territorial identity, 60; absence of, 62

Territoriality, 58-70, 100, 142, 183;
civil society and, 59; Islamic model
and, 66-67; Western model of, 66

Territorialization, 66, 69, 110, 227; ef-
fects of, 108; Hindu nationalism and,
68; nomadic populations and, 64-65;
Western rural society and, 59

Territorial logic, 60-62, Too, 111

Territorial organization, 142, 143

Territory: allegiance and, 64, 67-68;
community and, 60-61; feudal logic
and, 58; invention of, 59; power and,
36-37; state logic and, 59-60

Terrorism, 81, 2T0; international dis-
order and, 232

Theravada Buddhism, society and, 160

Third International, imperialism issue
at, 13

INDEX

Third world: defined, 2n; formation of,
1; looting of, 24

Third-world diplomacy, 216

Third-worldist view, 7

Thomism, 160

Tigreens, 82

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 123

Tohokai Party, 150

Totalitarianism, 1; democracy and, 158

Touré, Ahmed Sékou: local revolution-
ary powers and, 143; PDG and, 137,
140; symbols of struggle and, 19

Transnational flows, 37, 204, 229;
growth of, 34-35

Transnational groups: identification
of, 180; mobilization of, 81

Transnationalization, 168, 208

Transnational solidarities, 202, 224

Trash state, 25

Treaty of Erzerum (1847), Kurds and,
62

Treaty of Marrakech (1989), 221

Treaty of Nanking (1842), 76

Treaty of Sevres (1920), 110, II0n;
Kurdish territory and, 63

Treaty of Shimonoseki (1904), 77

Treaty of Tianjin (1858), 77

Tribalism, 15, 84; importation/
exportation and, 87; resurgence
of, 21; universality and, 83

Tribunals, 213, 218; establishment
of, 153; protest role for, 217

Tuaregs, dilemma for, 64-65

Tubus, armed conflict for, 65

Tudeh Party, Javadi and, 117

Turkish minorities, 225, 226

UAM. See Union of Arabic Maghreb

UGTM, 173

Ulama, 95, 113, 126, 176; revolution
and, 172

Ulama Association, 125, 126, 127

277

Ulema, 196

Umma, 40, 66, 67, 124, 125

UNESCO, 205

Unification, 1-2; by law, 70-77

Union démocratique du peuple malien,
158

Union of Arabic Maghreb (UAM), 221,
222, 224; Moroccan foreign policy
and, 26

United Independence Party (UNIP),
137,139

United Nations: Gulf crisis and, 73;
Kurdish refugees and, 226; New
Caledonia and, 25; sovereignty and,
g; universalization and, 78

Universal city, invention of, 48-57

Universalism, 7, 57, 68, 181; civil obedi-
ence and, 154; ulturalism and, 235;
Hobbesian, 55; state, 81; Western
rationalism and, 69

Universality, 48, 83, 155, 216; crisis of,
231; Islamic culture and, 87; of the
sovereign, 80

Universalization, 3, 51, 77, 84; forced,
203, 208-9; propensity toward, 73;
United Nations and, 78

Universal village thesis, problems with,
206-7

Urabi Pasha, 110; Nationalist Move-
ment and, 110n

Urbanization, 109; patron-client rela-
tion and, 189

Urban society, Gadhafi criticism on,
194

USA. See Arab Socialist Union

Usuli, 126

Valis, integration by, 62
Vargas, Getulio, 133n
Vattel, work of, 72
Veka’i, Takvimi, 119
Velayat-e-fakih, 130

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Verba, Sidney: Gu Civic cuiture, 51
Vertical solidarities, 27, 132,144
Violence: communitarian, 209; con-

trol of, 78, 107; individual /universal,
77; state use of, 82

Vitoria, work of, 71-72

Von Moltke, Helmuth, 94, 94n; Ot-
toman army and, 95

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 20

Waq/, institution of, 107

Weber, Max, 50, 210

Western culture, 32, 36; Asian culture
and, 118; Islamic culture and, 235

Westernization, 7, 57, 93, 96, 100, Ior,
III, 115, 224; cultural backwardness
and, 118-19; elite and, 113, 114;
forced, 105-6, 118, 208, 213, 234;
identity and, 120; importation and,
112; increase in, 55; intellectuals
and, 116; limitations on, 168; process
of, 96-97, 121; protest and, 123

Western law: conformity with, 153;
expansion of, 148; importation of,
151; public space and, 154

Western model, 28, 51, 100-101, 111,
II3, 152, 202, 205, 206, 235; crisis
of, 182 diffusion of, 96; importation
of, 91, 93, I00, 101-7, 177, 186, 204;
universalization of, 85, 87, 203,
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‘What is to be Done? (Chernyshevsky),

127

Workers Party, Young Egypt Party and,
133

World Bank, 45; adjustment policies
of, 191; Algeria and, 44, 221; China
and, 39

Writers Association, 197

Yan Fu, 56

Yassin, Abdessalem, 129

Young Bengal movement, 69

Young Egypt Party, 133

Young Turks, 113, 120; Postivism and,
56; westernization and, 112

Zain (President Zain Al Abidin), land
confiscation by, 44

ZANU. See Zimbabwe African National
Union

ZAPU, 134

Zghal, Abdelkadar, 173, 199

Zimbabwe, 114: agriculture in, 17, 114,
145, 187; external commerce for,
17-18, 104; importation in, 104;
Marxism in, 18 Zimbabwe African
National Union (ZANU), 105, 134,
180; agrarian reform and, 104-5;
colonial order and, 135; land collec-
tivization in, 187

Zsitva Torok Treaty (1606), 75

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AL SCIENCE /HISTORY

Westernization of the Political Order

Rertrand Badie

lranslated by Claudia Royal

‘This is an important book by any standard. No matter how commonplace
it is to observe that the state was born in Western Europe and subsequent!)
exported to the rest of the world, until now there has been no single book that
faces out the implications of this for those peripheral, extra-European societies
(hat were compelled to import this bizarre form of political order. It is impossi-
bie to do justice to the variety and scope of arguments that Badie develops in
this extraordinarily erudite and interdisciplinary work.” — Philippe C. Schmitter,
Stanford University

‘I’ hts book traces the rise of the modern state—a mode of organizing political
power within a closed territory —in post-Enlightenment Europe and its spread
to the remainder of the world, especially colonial and postcolonial societies.
The result of a long process of evolution dating back to the Roman Empire, this
new form of state was characterized by the coincidence of public power and
public space and the legalization of political and social relations. Intimate];
linked to the transformation of Western European cultures at a time when their
economic might allowed them to conquer many regions of the world, the
modern state provided a model that was adopted in most countries. Badie shows
that, from the beginning, various logics of importation led non-Western cultures
to invent their own practices of the state, thereby transforming the original
model. In many countries, notably in postcolonial societies, discrepancies
appeared between political actions and political representations and principles
on which the state was supposed to rest. This has often led to political crises and
breakdowns of legality and legitimacy, and to the formation of new types of

social relations in spaces the state cannot control.

Bertrand Badie is Professor at L’Institut des Etudes Politiques in Paris. He is the

itthor of several books on comparative political science and on Islam.